Authors: Elena Vrabie and Bogdan Iordache

To say the stakes are getting higher in space is an understatement. Satellites are multiplying. Support systems aren’t. And failures at 28,000 km/h cost millions. Charter Space understands that the line between a science project and a real industry is drawn in terms of compliance and capital: the insurance needed to recover when a mission doesn’t go as planned.

Charter Space is an all-in-one mission management platform for the space industry, founded in 2021 by Yuk Chi Chan and Yukun Yin, with early support from NASA engineers. In a sector where generic software dominates, time is lost, errors are overlooked, and manual processes slow everything down; they have unified the complex logistics of satellite missions.

In this interview, Yuk Chi Chan, a former soldier and lawyer who is now the founder of space infrastructure startup Charter, shares how his diverse background has shaped a leadership philosophy grounded in service and accountability. He delves into the complexity of building tools for teams in the space economy, the need for legal systems to catch up with technological advancements, and why infrastructure is what will drive expansion beyond Earth. 

Underline Ventures: Your career spans the military, law, and now building a space tech company. How have all these experiences shaped your philosophy of leadership and resilience as a founder? 

Yuk Chi Chan: One of my favorite movies is “We Were Soldiers”, starring Mel Gibson. He has this one line: “I will always be the first on the battlefield, and I will always be the last to leave it”. This aligns closely with my leadership philosophy. I grew up in a military family, in an environment that exemplifies a specific style of leadership – the idea that the officers should always eat last, and lead by example. 

I’ve always been comfortable taking on a leadership role, and I never ask anybody to do anything that I’m not willing and able to do. I expect those around me to follow, but I know that sort of loyalty and dedication have to be earned. Leadership is a privilege. You have to prove that you are worthy of that mantle at all times. 

When building tools, every aspect of our world runs on unseen, unheard systems that, when they fail to operate correctly, things stop working. But when they work perfectly, you never see anybody going: “Oh, well, fantastic! I’m so glad that the bus ran on time today!”. Nobody ever thanks the logisticians for doing their jobs well, but everybody is mad when they don’t do it. 

Building tools for the unsung heroes is also a very unsung and uncelebrated function. You don’t see companies building an industrial control system being celebrated. Building these tools is an act of service in and of itself. I’m not in this for the fanfare – it’d be nice to make a little bit of money, for obvious reasons, we’re all capitalistic here – but more importantly, I view it as being in service to a greater mission, a civilizational endeavor: to get us off this planet and to expand beyond Earth. 

UV: What sparked the initial idea of Charter Space, and why did you choose to position it as the “operating system for the space economy”? 

YCC: I remember when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 landed successfully for the first time in December 2015. I was still in the army at that time, watching it live, and thinking to myself: “Oh my God, everything has changed!”

When I was a space lawyer, I found myself in many rooms with various accomplished lawyers who were proposing to regulate space in some way, shape, or form. Funny thing – there was never an engineer in the room; the people for whom we were proposing to legislate were never adequately represented. So, at some point, I stopped and asked around, “Why are we doing this in a vacuum?” and the answer was always slightly condescending. “Because engineers don’t understand law”. Like all lawyers understand engineering?! It’s a two-way street. 

This was a catalyst for me to move closer to technology, to support some of these industry initiatives. So I left legal practice to join a space company. To some extent, those lawyers in those rooms were right. Engineers don’t always have an immediate appreciation for how important legal compliance is; they think “we’ll deal with that when it comes to it”,  but that’s not how it works. You need licences and paperwork for clearance. 

Charter was originally designed to make sense of weird structures that human systems have put in place. A big part of it has to be driven by engineering; nothing gets moved without the physical system being in place. Space does not exist without spacecraft, but there’s so much more to that. 

You need the ability to operate these things, and many other licenses for, let’s say, re-entry, which comes with additional obligations. Then there’s insurance and securing alternative forms of financing. So, when I say that we are the operating system for the space economy, I say we are enabling not only the engineering work, but everything else that makes it possible to build a space business. 

UV: Charter’s platform, Ubik, combines complex tasks, such as mission planning, compliance, and insurance, into a single platform. Can you walk us through the development process so far? What choices did you make to keep it powerful, but simple, based on user feedback?

YCC: We have maintained a user-focused feedback loop from day one. We’ve consistently involved pilots and industry customers, many of whom reported encountering certain problems as mission managers that they weren’t able to solve. They just put up with it. I thought, “This is nuts! You’re building multi-million dollar satellites over here!” and they said they were too busy to replace Excel, and if we could solve it, they’d be more than happy to help build it.

Having a strong user persona helps when we are prioritizing features to be built. We always have a clear idea of who we are building it for. Therefore, Ubik has four core modules: requirements management, systems design and systems management, project management, and process and procedure tracking. 

Those four modules flow neatly into each other, and there has never been an integrated tool that ties all four together before Ubik. That’s sort of the hidden fifth module. You reduce the amount of time that people need to double-check between different databases. 

We are here to serve the space industry and the engineers. What is the point of trying to do that if you’re not listening to their feedback? 

UV: Can you share a real-life example of Ubik’s impact? 

YCC: Our work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory*. It’s always my favorite story to tell, because it illustrates the thing that’s hardest to do, the fact that we are here for the long term. 

We launched our pilot with JPL in late 2022. Back then, we were still going through the Techstars Space Accelerator. They are the smartest people in every room they walk into; they can land and operate things on Mars. What value can you add to that?

When you get a lot of really small people together, they want to go fast when building great and daring things. But they have systems in place that have been there for decades. 

One of the things we found to be most valuable was helping with managing procedures. When you have a task to execute, let’s say a test, this will have a series of steps that you need to check off and record the checking off of them. You also record instances where things have gone wrong or deviated. If I see a step and I think it isn’t necessary, I’m going to skip it; somebody has to record that.  

If you are running enough tests, you end up with a lot of data, like objects, notes, photos, and videos that need to be contextualized. It’s a lot of work for people who shouldn’t be spending their time doing that. So, we helped digitize the way that JPL is currently running tests and integrating them into the rest of our software suite. We deployed this capability, and we piloted it with them over about nine months, culminating with a live field test of a robot. 

This robot EELS is designed to one day, hopefully, go to Saturn’s second-largest moon, Enceladus. This is an ocean world with an ice crust. We have it on good authority, thanks to the Cassini probe, that there are thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean. Now, when there’s heat and there’s water, there is the possibility of life. 

It’s an eight-year flight time from Earth, and when you get there, it’s dark. This robot has to autonomously navigate across the surface of ice, find one of the fissures that exist in the crust, swim to the bottom of the ocean, take samples, look for life, and then get back and transmit the results to Earth. 

It will take a very long time. We’re talking decades. We will be in the 2050s before this robot, if it’s successful, actually gets back to us. And there are so many different failure points along the way. To test it, as you can imagine, there are many different variables that we have to try to account for.

We supported JPL’s field test on a glacier in Canada, a hazardous environment. You can’t bring your laptop out there. So we built a mobile app and digitized the test procedures, and we mapped it one-to-one. We played a small part in a long engineering campaign to build this robot that will span decades and may have contributed to our expansion of knowledge and understanding of the universe around us. 

*(Ed. Note: JPL, managed by Caltech, is a federally-funded research and development center that supports a variety of NASA missions, including Voyager, Pathfinder, Curiosity, Perseverence, and Clipper.)

UV: You’ve said legal theory lags behind practical capability in space. With rising competition from private actors and contested orbits, what policies or global norms do you think are most urgent to address?

YCC: There isn’t enough communication between the law, the policymakers, and the actual industry. It’s changing in certain jurisdictions. I think that the United States has been more consultative, which helps spur the US space industry to a much dominant position. 

I would say one of the biggest areas that should be looked at in terms of policy updates is the rules around financing. Fun fact: There is an international treaty called “The Cape Town Convention” that governs the financing of various assets with a series of international rules and standards. 

Based on the structure of international law, treaties are entirely voluntary. Countries sign up to them, and if they don’t, then they’re not bound by them, which is why the US is not subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, because the United States has never ratified the Rome Statute. 

It’s been a while since I’ve checked, but a few years ago, only three countries had signed the space protocol, which I think is a tremendous waste*. One of the benefits of the rule of law as a concept is that it makes it a lot easier for people to understand how and what to expect if they participate in any given system. It will be tough to establish an advanced financial infrastructure in the space industry without clear rules to delineate all roles and responsibilities. If money wants to participate in space, we should make it easier for money to do so.

In my opinion, this is one of the lowest-hanging fruits on the policy tree we should look at more seriously in terms of adoption and refinement.

*(Ed. Note: Burkina Faso in West Africa, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe signed it, but not enough countries have ratified it, so it remains unenforceable.)

UV: Ubik now has an insurance product added inside. How do you see insurance changing as more private companies go to space?

YCC: Insurance is an important tool for any commercial industry’s expansion; it’s an important backstop against loss, a security layer to help raise capital, and to give investors the sense that the company is utilizing capital responsibly. Insurance is a guaranteed 1x return on your asset, which is more assurance than we have in most parts of life, let alone in something as risky as space. 

As space becomes more commercial-focused, more investors will be coming into the market who are not traditional space investors, and they’re coming in with fresh eyes. And they may ask, “Why do I have to subsidize R&D? Why can’t you just get insurance?”. 

Insurance is going to become more important, both as a means of ensuring mission success in the long run, as well as helping more external capital feel safe to participate in this economy. Insurance is what makes the difference between a science project and a real industry. 

UV: We’re seeing record budgets for space exploration and commercial activity worldwide. Are there risks of overhype in certain areas of space tech? Where do you think the smartest capital should go?

YCC: I think we’re still so early that, quite frankly, anything goes at this point. Just like in any industry, space is all about the people – smart capital follows smart talent. Having said that, there are certain categories of technology that I would never recommend because physical limitations have not been solved, yet.

For example, the idea of a single-stage-to-orbit launch vehicle. Right now, we have multi-stage launch vehicles: you have an initial first-stage booster to go the first leg, then a second-stage booster takes over to get the payload into orbit, and some companies are building third-stage vehicles to maneuver payloads directly to their target orbits. Single-stage-to-orbit is the idea of a space vehicle that takes off and lands, all in one vehicle. It takes off, gets there, and then maybe comes back down. No disposable parts that fall off, and you don’t need a multi-stage vehicle. I don’t think the technology is mature enough.

The other thing is nuclear propulsion, especially fusion propulsion. If we could crack fusion, why would we stick it on a rocket? Why wouldn’t we just put in a power plant on Earth and use it to generate infinite energy? Fusion has a lot more applications on Earth as of this exact moment than launching it into space. 

The right teams with the right backing can make all the difference in the world, or the solar system. As more money comes in, it will be like a rising tide: it lifts all boats. I know more competent teams that are looking for funding than there is funding available, and looking for talent. That’s not the case in most other areas of tech. If you’re a generalist investor and you can’t find a good home for your money elsewhere, put it in space.

There currently isn’t enough money available to build all the infrastructure we need to develop a truly off-planet civilization. It’s going to take cost, time, effort, resilience, and the more we fund ChatGPT wrappers, the less money there is available for us to escape our gravity well.

UV: What was the reason behind moving from the UK to the US, and how has that shift influenced your engagement with the government and your broader mission?

YCC: We were founded in London, and we left the UK because we weren’t getting anywhere. Within a month of arriving in the US, we already had government organizations that were eager to work with us. It hasn’t always been easy, but I can tell you that the effort we put into engaging with agencies within the US government has given us way more return than any amount of effort we’ve ever spent within the UK.

If you take a long view of the future, you can distill it into one of two outcomes: the ‘number’, meaning where civilization is and what the economy looks like, will either go up or down; it’s a binary thing. If you believe that number is going to go down, then why do any of us have jobs? We should all go sit on a beach somewhere and just enjoy ourselves. If we’re going to stagnate and wither, then there’s no point in doing anything. 

But if you believe the number is going to go up, and I believe that it will, then you have to recognize that Earth is physically constrained because there are only so many resources. I think we need to believe that the number is going to go up, and we have to build according to that belief, because that’s what it means to live with meaning. 

One must imagine Sisyphus happy. And if we want to build with that belief, that requires us to expand beyond Earth. We must believe that this moment is the inflection point where the number starts going up exponentially. It will take time, but the attitude and desire to want to do it are important; if there’s a will, then there’s a way. 

UV: How do you see the different approaches between the US and EU regarding space governance and sovereignty shaping the future of space operations?

YCC: Sovereign capabilities are increasingly popular as a talking point, as we see the idea of globalization falter. We’re becoming a more nationalistic, border-centric world. 

One of the big differences between the US and the EU is that the EU is not a country; it’s an economic bloc. It doesn’t even have any military capabilities; that’s the point of NATO. It doesn’t have to care about things like defence. Europe as a continent doesn’t have a clear relationship between constituent member states in terms of who owns what and who’s able to do what. 

The EU’s love of regulation affects the pace of innovation. My favorite story about the EU is that for a very long time, it wanted to set up a competing space agency to ESA, which is governed by a different instrument*. A comparable trading bloc in Asia is ASEAN. The members have significantly more autonomy over national policy; the confederation doesn’t propose to legislate for any of its member states; it doesn’t have any legislative functions, so every ASEAN member state maintains full sovereignty over what it can and cannot do. Any sort of top-down system will naturally be slower. 

The great story of American innovation is that it is a much more decentralized model, and that allows for innovation to flourish. Free competition is exactly what you need to move fast and break things. But on balance, you end up breaking fewer things, because you get efficient a lot faster. 

From the standpoint of a private business owner, I will go where I can move fastest, where each marginal unit of effort I put in returns me the best return. It’s not that the EU moves more slowly because it lacks talent, capital, or the ability to build things; it’s that the people who can do things end up moving to the US, because their effort is significantly more valued there by the market itself.  

(Ed. Note: The EU once considered creating a separate space agency similar to ESA, but instead, it expanded GSA into EUSPA, focusing on operations and services, while ESA remained the principal technical agency. ESA continues to be governed by a Council of Member States, independent from EU structures.)