Philip Hover-Smoot is the Founder and CEO of Atlas Cup, a professional sports media company building the world’s first orbital racing league. Before launching Atlas Cup in late 2025, he served as the CEO of Scout Space and previously held senior executive roles at Spaceflight and Momentus. A seasoned aerospace and defense executive and California-licensed attorney, Philip has worked across military and commercial space, space law and regulation, satellite technology, and executive leadership. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and now focuses on developing a global sports property at the intersection of space, technology, and entertainment.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [1:28] Philip Hover-Smoot’s vision for professional spacecraft racing in low Earth orbit
- [2:36] Why commercial space and changing media habits created an opening for Atlas Cup
- [4:54] How short-form social, mobile, and streaming content shapes the fan experience
- [9:05] The 2028 inaugural Grand Prix and crawl-walk-run approach to orbital racing
- [17:27] How competition could accelerate spacecraft innovation beyond government-funded development
- [20:46] Why Atlas Cup’s business model is structured to minimize regulatory and licensing burdens
- [33:37] How fans can follow Atlas Cup as the company builds toward its first championship
- [34:29] Philip explains why sport and space can inspire curiosity, wonder, technology adoption, and the next generation
In this episode…
Commercial space is entering a phase where entertainment, media, and competition can become viable applications alongside government and industrial missions. As spacecraft capabilities mature and sports consumption shifts toward social, mobile, and streaming platforms, orbital racing could turn advanced satellite performance into a fan-facing spectacle. How can a professional racing league in low Earth orbit become both compelling entertainment and a catalyst for space innovation?
According to Philip Hover-Smoot, who leads Atlas Cup as its founder and CEO, the opportunity comes from combining technologies that already exist with a proven racing format and a media model designed for how audiences consume sports today. Instead of building its own spacecraft, Atlas Cup plans to bring together existing maneuverable satellites, imagery providers, telemetry systems, and race teams while creating short-form storytelling around their performance. Competition can reward speed, maneuver accuracy, efficiency, communication, and other measurable capabilities, creating incentives for technology development while opening opportunities for sponsorships, prediction markets, and fan engagement.
In this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Chad Franzen welcomes Philip Hover-Smoot, Founder and CEO Atlas Cup, for a conversation about building professional sports in space. Philip explains Atlas Cup’s 2028 orbital racing plans, short-form media strategy, regulatory model, technology incentives, and the evolution from uncrewed satellite races toward his long-term vision of humans competing in space.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Atlas Cup
- Philip Hover-Smoot on LinkedIn
- Atlas Cup on LinkedIn
- Fédération Internationale des Sports Orbitaux (FISO)
- Atlas Cup on Instagram
- Formula One: Drive to Survive
- America’s Cup
Quotable Moments
- “Fundamentally, I’m introducing professional sports to space — high-tech spacecraft racing head-to-head in low-Earth orbit.”
- “We like to take expensive, high-tech objects and see which one is best. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
- “If we can do what automotive racing did for the car industry, for the space industry, this is good for everyone.”
- “The first time humans race in space, it’s going to be the most watched broadcast in the history of broadcast.”
- “People watch sports because we want to see the magic of what can be — and space creates that same sense of wonder.”
Action Steps
- Design content for modern sports consumption: Build media experiences around short, engaging clips optimized for social, mobile, and streaming audiences rather than relying solely on traditional long-form broadcasts.
- Use existing technology before building from scratch: Identify proven technologies, partners, and infrastructure that can support a new business model without unnecessary capital expenditure or technical risk.
- Create multiple measures of competitive excellence: Look beyond a single definition of winning by rewarding accuracy, efficiency, speed, communication, and other measurable performance indicators.
- Structure the business around core expertise: Build partnerships and contracts that keep the company focused on its strongest capabilities while externalizing specialized regulatory, manufacturing, and operational responsibilities.
- Connect innovation to an emotional story: Pair technical achievements with compelling human narratives, competition, and visual storytelling to make complex industries understandable and exciting to broader audiences.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 Media, we feature top founders, executives, and business leaders from all over the world.
Chad Franzen: 00:20
IChad Franzen here co-host of the Top Business Leaders Show, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help B2B businesses reach their dream relationships and connect with more clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships and get ROI through done for you podcasts. If you have a B2B business and want to build a great relationship, there’s no better way to do it than to profile the people and companies you admire on your own podcast. To learn more, go to rise25.com or email us at support at rise25.com.
My guest today is Philip Hover-Smoot, founder and CEO of Atlas Cup, a San Francisco based company developing a professional orbital sports centered on spacecraft racing. Before founding Atlas Cup, Philip worked across commercial space, national defense, law investing, and entrepreneurship. His background also includes a Stanford University education, and he is a California attorney. Philip, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 01:17
I’m doing great, Chad. Thanks for having me on.
Chad Franzen: 01:19
Hey, so tell me what. I guess if you could sum it up, what kind of led to the founding of the Atlas Cup? And then tell us just a little bit more about what it is?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 01:28
Yeah, sure. So I mean, the story is actually a little bit. There’s a long version and a short, short version we can get into. However much of that as you want. What it is though, is probably a great starting point.
So fundamentally, I’m introducing professional sports to space. So this is high tech, cutting edge spacecraft racing head to head in low-Earth orbit through a series of maneuvers. Think America’s Cup or F1 meets the new space economy. It’s the fastest sport in history. The base speeds are around 17,000mph, and we’re taking the absolute best of space tech today, and we’re just putting it head to head against itself in space.
We’re going to go create a bunch of content around it. We’re going to do stills, video, beautiful tracking graphics based on telemetry and tracking technologies. And then we’re going to go off and create short format vignette sports content initially and eventually build it into, you know, longer format and eventually live events as well.
Chad Franzen: 02:22
Wow. That’s, that’s an amazing, that’s an amazing goal. What, what kind of led you to start that? You know, was there like a problem in the commercial space industry that you thought Atlas Cup needed to fulfill or to solve?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 02:36
Yeah. So it’s interesting, right? I mean, we’re not like a traditional, like, I don’t know, like a B2B SaaS company that’s like, I’ve got like a, you know, inefficiency in my workflow and software solution that fixes it. No, we’re not that right. This is more.
Have you heard of the book The Medici Effect? Right. This idea, like Medici has brought together, like all these different types of artisans and thinkers and intellectuals. And basically this confluence of diverse ideas yielded some really cool stuff. I think about this more like that.
This is me taking my experience to date, looking across the industry, looking across the sector, seeing what’s been happening as well in media and sports, and really just connecting a bunch of disparate dots in a way that people haven’t thought of before. There’s no fundamental problem that a sports league ever solves, right? Right. That said, we actually do provide a really cathartic evolutionary benefit to the nascent space industry, very similar to that which occurred during the early 20th century in the automotive industry. Automotive racing took over really just a couple years after the invention of the automobile and then racing.
And that ethos of, of excellence and comparative excellence that became really fundamental to how the automotive industry eventually evolved and matured as, as the industrialized and then eventually changed the planet and how we live our lives. Right? I mean, the car changed a lot. So we see the same thing happening, albeit on a different timeline, right? Space we’ve been in for about 60 years, but the commercial space ecosystem has really only started to take off in the last 1015.
And it’s still early, early with an asterisk and that there’s 150 companies building maneuverable platforms. In the US alone, there’s 450 companies building propulsion systems, basically motors for satellites. So we’re not talking about really early, but in a lot of ways we are. Right. We haven’t really started to think about how to commercialize, right.
This is still a huge challenge for a lot of the space industry. Most people are going after government dollars. So truly, purely commercial endeavors in space are still a bit fleeting. But I think entertainment content and sports specifically is the first bite at the apple that we can really materially go take aside from some kind of like one off tourism activities, which frankly, have already kind of been happening. This is the first real, durable, recurring revenue from a purely commercial source that can exist in space.
And I’m going to go capture it.
Chad Franzen: 04:50
Yeah. Awesome. So how do you see this working as entertainment?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 04:54
Yeah, sure. So we’re, we’re really not recreating the wheel here, right? We’re taking a trusted, proven format of sport. This is head to head, high tech racing, right. We’ve done that with everything from camels, horses, planes, trains, automobiles doesn’t matter.
We raced barges down the Erie Canal. We’ve raced planes, you know, in the harbor in Rio. It doesn’t make a difference. We are humans. We like to compete.
We also like to take expensive high tech objects and see which ones best. So we’re doing that. This is no recreation. Right. This is, you know, from a formatting perspective, it’s similar to America’s Cup or SailGP, right?
You pick a place, pick a body of water, pick a time, pick a starting point, define a series of maneuvers, define a form factor. Define the rule set. Let people go and race. They bring their own vehicles. They bring their own craft.
They go and they complete the maneuvers. If they complete it, you know, compliantly and first they win. It is a very, very proven, straightforward format of sport. The entertainment content itself also, again, is not something we’re trying to recreate here, right? The one thing that makes us different is we are starting from scratch, right?
We’re starting with a blank slate. So we get to look at where the market is today and where it’s going in the near term. We’re not like most other sports out there, which are taking traditional formats and then trying to reconfigure them for today’s modern consumer, right? So you’ve got a million sports teams, leagues, platforms, franchises out there that are trying to figure out how to take, you know, a 150 year old soccer franchise and make it tick tock. Ready?
Right. That’s a totally separate challenge. Not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build for where people consume sports today. Right.
And this is kind of the phenomenal shift that really kind of back to your original question about kind of like what, what caused this and what the trigger is and what the pain point is. It’s not a pain point. It’s an opportunity that happened five years ago, when I first six years ago, when I first had this idea, people were consuming their sports content primarily through two hour linear, right? It was a traditional Saturday afternoon, two hours of live watching a bowl game, right. That is not the case anymore.
So about one, you know, a small single digit percent of sports content five, six years ago is consumed through social, mobile and streaming. This year it’s going to be over 50%. Right. So suddenly we’ve gone from this world where sports were formatted and optimized for two hour live events, both in person and to be watched via broadcast. And now the majority of sports content is being consumed through short formats.
It’s 30, 60, 92nd clips on TikTok, Instagram, and, you know, YouTube and proprietary web and app portals. And that’s what we get to build for. So we’re doing exactly what people have done before, right? Same format of racing, same format, even from a content creation presentation structuring perspective, right? It’s, you know, two announcers in a booth branded, hey, welcome back to turn four of Atlas Cup where last time we checked in, the satellites were here, this one fell apart.
And this one’s going this way. Right. You know, coming up, we’re going to be doing this and just narrating, visualizing, explaining what’s going on, talking about the strategy, talking about the rules, interviewing the people. But we’re doing it in a shorter format. And that’s why this is doable, right?
So what we couldn’t do cost effectively on a recurring basis today is produce a live event in space. We could do it, but it would be very, very expensive. And it would be hard to do regularly. What we want to do is harness both the trend of where people are consuming sports today and the existing capabilities from a visualization and tracking perspective that are in space today. That’s my expertise.
And go create a bunch of short format content. So think 2 or 3 times a day, we’re going to release a 30, 60, 92nd short across all platforms. And we’re going to do that in perpetuity effectively. Once we start race ops, we plan to have a number of different formats, a number of different races, a number of different form factors, race types, rule sets, and we’re just going to go create content and we’re going to be a content generation machine. And I’m going to do 30, 60, 92nd clips over and over and over and over and over.
And they’re going to look and they’re going to feel and they’re going to sound just like normal sports content. The only difference is the thing that’s happening in it is happening in space, right? So there are some fundamental differences in the production stack, right? How we do it, what we use in space to go image these things that’s all going to be new and different and challenging, challenging from a storytelling and fan appreciation perspective, not actually technically challenging because all that tech exists at all. It’s all there.
I just need to go buy it, but it’s gonna look and feel like a regular sport. So that’s the simple answer.
Chad Franzen: 08:57
So yeah, take us through a typical Atlas Cup race as you envision it. How would it work from the start of the event to the finish?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 09:05
Yeah, sure. So in early stages, right. So you gotta kind of think about this as crawl, walk, run, right? We’re, we’re, we’re talking today about building the crawl version, right? That’s 2028.
That’s our first inaugural grand Prix. That’s going to be approximately half a dozen competitors in the professional league, half a dozen competitors in the University League. They’re just going to be doing a series of maneuvers, relatively simplified, so that we can go off and go prove that we can go do it, create the event, and start to build that fan base. Over time, this gets substantially more, more complicated. But for what we’re doing, initially, these are satellites that are already being flown.
So one that’s an important qualifier in this entire thing. We’re not asking people, we’re not like SailGP in the sense that SailGP defined the boat and said, okay, look, if you want a team, buy into the league, build this boat, and then you can staff it and operate it however you want. We’re saying there’s no buy in requirement for people initially, right? This is just a free entry. Come and compete.
I need participants, otherwise I don’t have a sport. And we’re saying, look, we’re going to broadly define the form factors here. Right? So for the professional league we’re talking 250 kilogram plus chemical propulsion, right. Which kind of narrows down that 150 satellite operators just in the US alone to maybe like 50 or 60 that are potentially qualified.
Now of those, they’re all flying demo missions and they’re all flying operational missions. And many of these satellites are flying as really lost leaders, right? I mean, they’re not necessarily closing their business cases. They’ll build a satellite for 5 to $10 million. They’ll sell one, two, $3 million worth of services or capacity or delivery contracts.
And then and then the satellites are just there, and it’s cool. And it’s a satellite and it goes fast and it does things and they can use it as a testing bed. But the reality is, I came from two companies that do maneuverable satellites. And those business cases are really hard to close. And they were hard years ago.
And now there’s just more competition. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten any easier. So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to give people an opportunity to commercialize these assets once they’re done with their primary missions. So for 2028, practically speaking, those satellites that are racing are flying this year, right? So these are built, funded, booked on rockets right there.
They’re going to space. They’re going to do some other stuff for the next year or 2 in 2028, the second half of 28 starting mid-July and ending in early December. They’re going to race. And this is just a series of maneuvers that occur in coordination so that, you know, like satellites are performing maneuvers at similar times. So we can kind of create that competitive atmosphere.
And then we’re going to do a series of maneuvers in sequence over a period of time and use that to go create content. Those maneuvers involve primarily altitudinal changes in the crawl version of this, but eventually this will be ups and downs and lefts and rights and diagonals. So think drone racing league if you will, right. But in space. And that is really what people are building for today.
The primary customer for all things in space is the US military. The US military’s strongest strategic priority set right now is something called dynamic Space Ops. Dynamic space ops is founded upon the need for high maneuverability. So those are inclination changes, plane changes, phase shifting altitudinal changes, high command and control, like things like pointing accuracy, which is actually exceedingly important and kind of part of the gameplay strategy for the sport that we’re building, which gets back to this entire issue of me needing to go educate people on how space works, because no one understands when I say pointing, they’re like, oh, okay, sure, but no one actually knows what the hell I’m talking about. But all of these things end up being integrated into this maneuver based competition.
People will have cameras in space that are, you know, basically operated by a network of different partners who are at different points in orbit, right? So orbits are quite, quite large. So maybe we’ll be lucky. And sometimes those cameras are close and we’ll get these really beautiful up close images. Maybe sometimes we’ll have faraway images.
We’ll have ground based tracking, telemetry and control. Watching these things and visualizing these things. That technology has become exceedingly beautiful at this point, right? I mean, we’re talking about really high glossy fidelity, you know, like, you know, 4K images of satellites flying around the limb of the earth and things like that. And then they’re gonna go compete.
They’re gonna perform their maneuvers. We’re going to measure it with a very, very high degree of accuracy, using a couple of different methodologies to ensure that we’re actually kind of providing that factual realism that sports fans need, right? I mean, like, they need, you know, really specific measurements to make sure that we’re actually being fair because we’re also looking to integrate with the prediction market and gaming markets. And then we’re going to go off and go bake all of that into the storytelling in the short format content. Additionally, one point on the explanatory, you know, kind of getting our fans aware of how the world works, what spaces educational content to set the stage, as well as the human story here to make sure that people understand the people involved, the companies involved, the strategies, the technologies, all these things we’re going to basically leverage, again, the best of basically proven sports docs, right?
So we’re taking the best of things like drive to survive and we’re just recreating it in space. We want to start in January, following our teams through the 18 months leading up to racing, watching them operate these satellites in space, talking to them about what they’ve developed, watching them build the new satellites and talking about the design considerations and things that break the things that work, the things that don’t work. So when we get to racing, it’s not just, hey, here’s a really, you know, sexy, big, expensive object flying at 17,000 miles an hour against other objects going similarly fast. But it’s a story of the people. It’s a story of the technologies and the strategies.
And we’ll have the big company versus the small, scrappy startup. And we’ll have like the crazy billionaire and we’ll have the, you know, the, the bootstrapped college grad who’s decided to go off and go do something insane and we can go storytell around it because we need to go create that human story as well.
Chad Franzen: 14:21
So the winner of the race will have won because of his or her or their ability to do what?
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Philip Hover-Smoot: 14:28
Yeah. So that’s a really great point. So that’s not 100% clear at this point, right? So I can say in very simple terms, sure. The first person to complete all maneuvers Compliantly wins.
That’s certainly going to be part of it. But that’s not it. So because again, we’re talking about a completely different format and a completely different operating environment with different indicators of success, we can actually gamify and compete on different criteria, right? So you can have first completion. You can have the fastest leg, you can have the most accurate maneuver, you can have the most efficient turning and repositioning.
You can have a number of different competitive elements that are constantly happening, you know, kind of side by side. So unlike a traditional sport where you’ve got kind of like one indicia, like traditional auto racing, right? It doesn’t matter. It is just first across the line. What if F1 were actually who’s, you know, who’s turning the best, who’s overtaking is demonstrably, you know, data driven the best.
Right. I mean, there’s and it’s kind of a weird way to think about it, but this is, I think, more of a feature than a flaw for us because again, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to introduce a whole bunch of different ways to measure success and excellence, right? And that’s partially driven by the reality of what it means to operate in space. But it’s also partially driven because that’s our revenue opportunity, right? The more things we can talk about, the more things we can gamify, the more things that create and drive strategy, give us more opportunity to go kind of describe and provide content, but it also gives us more opportunities to integrate with, you know, sponsors or potential revenue partners.
Right. So I mentioned betting and gambling, right. Prediction market world. The more beatable binaries we can create, the better, right? So it’s not just who did the thing first, it’s also who did it most accurately.
Who, who executed within their parameters most correctly, who was able to communicate most quickly. Right. And then we can kind of gamify different elements of it. Additionally, we can have sponsors who have different concerns, right? Some sponsors might be focused on, you know, the story around technical excellence for pointing or accuracy and high level command and control, like a comms company, for instance.
Right. They might want to be the sponsor for that subset of how the game works, whereas other companies might be more focused on the human interest stories, right. And, and kind of like the traditional consumer CPG world, in which case they’re maybe going to be more focused on social activities. So that gives us different ways to sell to different sponsors, gives us different ways to partner with the gaming and, you know, prediction market world. We love it.
But it’s a great question and I would just say more to come. But we’re still very early days.
Chad Franzen: 16:55
And then you mentioned that the short form videos might be consumed similarly to professional sports, where there would be an, an announcer or something or a couple of announcers, something like that. So just as an announcer guy, I’m just curious, would you have a, like a play by play guy and an expert common insight guy? Yeah.
Philip Hover-Smoot: 17:13
That’s interesting. We don’t know yet. And that’s a wonderful question. I’m not totally sure.
Chad Franzen: 17:19
Do you think that this kind of head to head competition can advance spacecraft technology faster than traditional development programs?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 17:27
Yeah, 100%. So this goes back to my original point about the role that automotive racing played in the early days of the automotive industry and how it was cathartic, right? It became this catalyst for, for development, right? It created new technologies that became part of cars today, like active suspension, power steering, and anti-lock brakes. These all came out of the racing ecosystem.
Right. And that will happen here as well. Right. And I think we’re already starting to see it. But the trigger right now is government dollars.
And that’s not the right incentive for people to go build the next generation of space tech. We need to find other ways to do it. And I think this can be one of those ways. It’s not the only way, it’s not to the exclusion of government effort, but it is a material incentive, right? We’re offering real cash prizes to the winners.
That is a reason to go off and focus on being better. And also, I think just fundamentally, you know, we’ve been around for seven months now and we’ve got a number of teams who are interested in racing. We’ve got dozens of partners signed up to early deals. We’ve got active sponsor conversations ongoing. And in the space industry, everyone gets it.
Everyone understands that. If we can do what automotive racing did for the car industry, for the space industry, this is good for everyone. And I think that’s why, you know, engineers are also highly competitive people, right? They’re kind of similar to a lot of other professions where we all think we’re like the smartest person in the room. So like, we like the idea of thinking our widget is the best widget.
Damn it, we’re gonna go prove that we’re the best widget, right? So I think that will have this really beneficial effect. And moreover, I think this is also something that’s going to be eventually good for government operators. Right. And again, I was in the government world, in the defense world for a decade.
I don’t want to do that anymore. That’s partially why I left to go do something that’s purely commercial. But I would be remiss if I didn’t flag the fact that the things that we’re focused on, the things that we’re trying to incentivize, the things that we’re trying to gamify, are the same priorities that the government is working on. So if we’re successful at what we’re doing, it’s only going to redound to the benefit of government operators as well. So I think that’s going to be good for everyone.
Moreover, I think there’s also not to get a little bit messianic here, but like, there’s also a really good history. If you look at the reality of what geopolitics has been and its relationship to sport over the years, there’s actually been a very interesting kind of interplay between the two, right? You had like, you know, the great hockey game between the USSR and the US back in the day that actually resulted in a cooling of tensions, right? You’ve had sport and, you know, ping pong in China. And, you know, this is one of those things that, you know, the World Cup just brought together a whole bunch of people, right?
We allowed the Iranian team under weird conditions, but. Right. I mean, there’s, there’s history here that’s actually quite good. And fundamentally, I’ve spent a decade now really building weapons in space, and I don’t necessarily want to see the world go into a grand conflagration. I don’t want there to be war.
Right. And in some small way, I do think that creating a globally accepting, egalitarian, data driven, organic competition across industry, across the planet is going to be good, right? And we can have a Chinese company racing a US company or a Russian company racing a British company. And it’s all in sport, right? It’s cleansed, it’s safe.
It’s done for good purposes. And arguably it might be good, right? It might, it might help cool tensions. Whereas everyone in the space industry today is basically just planning on how their widgets are going to help fight China. That’s not the right mentality for how to commercialize space.
That’s not going to work well for anyone. And if we end up in war, then everyone loses anyways. So yeah.
Chad Franzen: 20:38
What have you found to be or are the most difficult legal and regulatory questions involved in this kind of endeavor?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 20:46
Yeah, sure. So I mean, we didn’t really talk about much about my background, but I am a lawyer by trade. And, you know, I, I really focused primarily for the last ten years on regulatory law in the aerospace defense industry, primarily on space licensing. So the beauty here is I’ve actually crafted this entire business strategy around how to be low regulation and to not fall into any of the traps that have been problematic and expensive for existing space companies or defense companies who are working in this space. What I’ve done is structured it so that we don’t build, operate, test, manufacture, insure, license, anything.
That means that our teams who are building their own satellites and flying their own satellites and doing their own primary missions, they do most of their licensing, if not all of it. And the parties who were buying imagery and telemetry from, they’re doing their own licensing too. So we don’t have to do any of the traditional regulatory stuff that most space companies have to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on. We’ve externalized all of that, right? I don’t really care if someone can’t get their license to operate.
They’re just not going to race. Right? If I can’t, if you know, one of my vendors can’t take images that day, well, that’s why I’ve got other vendors, right? So I think I’m not really worried about it from that perspective. It’s, it’s really, again, kind of a feature, not a flaw.
And additionally, again, because we’re not building anything and we’re not, you know, we’re, we’re operating as kind of like a sensor fusion engine and a media company, but we’re not creating any of the data inputs. We’re not creating any of the data ourselves means, you know, we, we can be hands off on a lot of the cybersecurity stuff as well. Not to say that we’re lax on that approach, but we just simply don’t have to invest in the, you know, I ran the cybersecurity, you know, implementation process for the last three companies I was at. And I mean, between the three of them, millions of dollars were spent and many, many, many months of angst and work. We don’t have to do that, right?
Because we’re not touching controlled data. So we love that. Additionally, I think the fundamentals of this, of course, really draw down to kind of public prerogative and good, right? So to say, you know, we’re going to externalize it fine. That’s fine from an investor, kind of like a business model perspective.
But it doesn’t mean that we’re not taking these things seriously, right? We are also leaning very far forward from a regulatory perspective into what the best practices for creating media and content and sport in space might actually look like. In fact, the same week I started Atlas Cup, I also founded with some attorney friends of mine, the Federacion Internationale des Hopitaux in Paris, which is basically the FIFA or FIA, if you will, of orbital sport. And the idea there is for us, racing is the low hanging fruit. This is what I can do today with existing tech.
I don’t have to build anything, test anything, invest in anything. I can just do it with stuff that’s already flying, right? So great. That’s the low hanging fruit. I go connect the dots, I go produce the event and bingo, bingo.
I’ve got the first sport in space before anyone else. That gives me a nice little cachet of being first, I love it. I am not the only person looking at sports in space. There are a number of people looking at sports in space, including the UFC, as negotiations with a company called vast to go off and go do a fight in a space station. As far as the industry is aware, there are two companies looking at doing lunar buggy racing And there are a number of other companies that are at some phase, shape or form of something related to competitive events or content production in space.
There’s nothing other than a really disparate world of different government regulators that are looking at how to do this well and how to do this safely, and how to do this maturely, and what FIFA, FIA and other sports related organizations have done is they’ve provided that kind of external, super governmental meaning. They’re not getting in the way of government regulation, but they’re sitting outside of government regulation, and they’re providing a means by which to apply best practices. Right? And we want to do the same thing with f ISO. We want to go off and go be kind of the industry shapers to say, look, whether you’re doing an MMA fight in a space station or you’re racing buggies on the moon or you’re racing satellites, it doesn’t matter.
Someone should be a forcing function to say, hey, look, there needs to at least be a consideration and an application of industry best practices to ensure safety and responsibility, right? So we’re not damaging the lunar environment or creating a risk of debris or collision in space or doing things that shouldn’t be done. Now, the government regulators will do that already in some way, shape or form. But I think there’s an absolute need that we should have an industry level, commercially led organisation that does the same thing. So we’re trying to do both.
So again, from a business perspective, I’ve externalized all that cost all that risk. Don’t know, don’t care. Right. But from a being a good human and an ethical operator perspective, we’re leaning heavily forward into making sure that we’re making people think about it. We’re trying to engage with, you know, folks like the World Anti-Doping League and Unesco to make sure that we’re actually engaging intelligently and appropriately so that we’ve professionalized sports in space very early.
Right? We will lose our fan base. We’ll lose our industry appreciation and acceptance if we start doing stupid things right. So my goal, my job is to build my sport and, and also build a structure that kind of forces everyone to be smart about it at the same time.
Chad Franzen: 25:32
Yeah. You mentioned that you have, you know, experience in the defense and in government. You’re also you’ve also got a legal background. How has that shaped the way you think about this?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 25:43
Yeah. So I mean, fundamentally it kind of is a lot of it, right? I’m not an engineer. I can’t build anything in space. I don’t know how to build a spacecraft.
Right. Like, I mean, I’ve been around the world enough to like pick up enough buzzwords that I can kind of pretend with engineers that I know what I’m talking about, but like, you know, go more than an hour and you’ll know that I’m, I’m full of it. Right? And I, and I own that. Like, I don’t pretend to be what I’m not.
But, you know, creating a business that’s purely a legal business is hard right there. There aren’t many businesses out there that are well suited to that. This is tough, right? This is a partnership ecosystem, really the entire thing’s contract driven, right? Which is beautiful.
It allows me to, you know, have low overhead. I don’t need an office. I don’t need a warehouse. I don’t need test facilities. I don’t have an errand budget.
I don’t need a CTO. I don’t even need a co-founder. I just get to cut contracts. I can cut contracts until the cows come home. I’ve done hundreds of millions.
And depending on how you want to count over a billion in, in contracts on the commercial side, in the space industry, I can do this perfectly myself. So that is really kind of again, feature more than flaw, right? I mean, this business allows me to operate with really happy margins and a great business model and also largely do a lot of the heavy lifting myself. Which is great. That said, it’s also, you know, the legal stuff led into the investing stuff.
And that’s also giving me a really interesting window, I’d say, into the industry itself, right. And how to think about business opportunity and risk and, and kind of trying to track to those broader trends, you know, at a timeline that is early enough to be a front runner, but also not so early that, you know, you’re just an idiot and you’re 50 years too early and good luck to you. Right. So I think it’s good. It’s a, it’s a bit of that risk apprehension that is kind of keeps everyone honest and happy, but also enough exposure into the structuring and strategy that I think this has led me to go create something that is properly timed, risk adjusted, and can be executed by something, someone without a technical background and quickly to timing.
And this is an important point that I probably should have led with the timing is the real issue here, right? This is why this makes sense now and didn’t make sense five six years ago, partially I mentioned, right. The consumer behaviors around where and how people are consuming sports content has shifted. Cool. But it’s also this major.
I hate the term, but it’s an inflection point in the industry as well, right? We’ve had a decade to 15 years of heavy investment into the space industry, into this new space world of commercial space operators. And it’s starting to prove out, right? I mean, we now have a lot of people building a lot of hardware and a lot of stuff going to space. That means we can go off and go do this realistically, right?
I mean, like I used to run a company, you know, the last two and a half years, I was the CEO of Scout Space and we did space domain awareness, basically optics and space. Looking at stuff in space. You can see the obvious connection here, but that capability is widely available now, right? I mean, there’s, there’s maybe 20 companies in China doing space surveillance technologies in one way, shape or form. There’s a bunch in Europe, there’s dozens in the US.
There’s a lot of cameras out there. Right. So fundamentally, those cameras are all going to be usable for a bunch of different things. So that technology wasn’t readily available ten years ago. It was real.
It just wasn’t kind of scaled. Additionally, there’s more attention on the space industry now than there has been at any point in the last 60 years. Right? We’ve got Artemis three and four in the next two years. We’ve got China potentially, depending on how their rocket development process works out, going to the south pole of the moon with Chang G seven, that’s a big deal.
We’ve got vast flying the first commercial space station. That’s a huge deal. The idea that a private company is operating a space station is amazing. That’s going to be next year in theory, right? And we’ve got 250 million live viewers expected to watch Americans go back to the moon in two years.
That’s going to happen at the same time as our inaugural races, right? So we’ve timed this intentionally. So at the point where we’re going to have 250 million people, mind you, is the most watched broadcast in the history of humanity, right? So that is the most watched media of any kind will be in space and will be happening at the exact same time as we’re launching our races. So from my perspective we’ve got space just went IPO and the biggest IPO of all time.
We’ve got all these big events that are all happening in the next 24 months that we get to go leverage and basically say, all right, cool. Like space is having a moment. What do we do with that moment? Well, let’s go try to get people excited about something else and see if it takes.
Chad Franzen: 30:01
So beyond kind of beyond the initial launch in the next 24 months, maybe over the next five years, what are some milestones that might tell you? Okay, this is, this has gone from being maybe an interesting concept to now this is a, this is like a thing like a sustainable sport.
Philip Hover-Smoot: 30:16
Yeah, sure. So the scale ups very fast, right? So the initial concept of maneuver based competition can then be expanded. We can change form factors. We can change the degree of maneuver, we can change the types of maneuvers.
We can change the event format. We can do things like capture the flag. We can do, you know, cislunar corkscrews. We can do weird stuff further out into the solar system. Actually, it’s not that hard to do.
And we’re already talking with people about doing something out to Mars. This evolves fast from a race content perspective. Additionally, broadly, there’s a lot of content creators that are out there that are looking at doing things in space. So we’re already in conversation and negotiation with one entity about producing their event for them, taking our content production stack and doing it for them. So there’s a good, healthy, happy business.
I think that’s down the road there as well. And then more, more kind of vision wise, right? Of course, at the end of the day, my existing investors are pushing me very hard on this already. And a lot of new investors that I’ve been talking to seem interested in it is the idea of, you know, what does it take to eventually get humans to, to compete in space? Right.
And I think that is very realistic in theory. We could do that today. It would be exceedingly expensive. But we have the technology, we’ve done it. Commercial companies have sent humans to space.
There’s no reason we couldn’t do it. But we do want to go there, right? I think the kind of the talking point that I, that I’ve kind of had since day one of this business and the hill that I will happily die on is the first time humans race in space, it’s going to be the most watched broadcast in the history of broadcast. It will be the first billion person live event. If you have humans racing in space and every person with a smartphone on the planet, call it 5 billion phones today, 6 billion next year, everyone’s going to get a push notification saying humans are racing in space for the first time.
Click here to watch. 99% of people are going to click that link just out of pure curiosity, right? So, you know, basically this is my, my big pie in the sky. Like, look, if I’m successful, this scales from, you know, kind of natural evolution of bigger satellites, larger form factors, different models to eventually humans racing in space in the future, not terribly distant future, but we want to go do that. And when we do, that’s where we hit the real scale, right?
Suddenly we’re not talking about the best performing Super Bowl of all time. Maxes out at about 150 million viewers. I’m going to ten X by doing something in space. And that’s, that’s the vision, right? So when I think about how I sell the hockey stick, look, where does this business go?
How do I get there? I’m under no illusion that there’s going to be a growth period here. But if that growth period is a deliberate and structured and risk adjusted approach towards that big moonshot will help you get to value that moonshot, right? If I can actually go build a billion person live event that is gonna blow every sport on the planet out of the water, now, there’s a lot to get there, right? Which is why I’m not an insane person.
I’m not like, oh my God, we’re gonna go fly people in space next year. No, no, no, no. Right. This is going to take time. Technology is real.
The technology exists, the appetite is there. And we’re just going to build deliberately towards making that happen. And I think again, when we do it, we’re going to be stratospherically bigger than the NFL, which sounds so insane when I say because the NFL is just phenomenal in so many ways. But again, the most watched event in the history of broadcast is going to be in space and it’s going to be a sport.
Chad Franzen: 33:31
Sounds awesome. So I have one more question for you, but how can people find out more about the Atlas Cup?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 33:37
Yeah, sure. So we’re available on pretty much all platforms and channels. We’ve got a new website launching, hopefully at the end of this week. That’s Atlas cup.com, a TLAS cup.com. We’re on all major social verticals so you can go find us pretty easily.
You can also just Google space racing. I think we’re the first hit. And yeah, we’re readily available out there. I’d say everyone take a look and, and kind of like and follow again, we’re brand new as a business, right? Seven months old.
So we haven’t produced much, if really any content thus far, but we have a big plan towards the second half of the year to go off and go start to provide some of that content and then leading into the docu series next year. So lots of content comes very shortly across all those verticals.
Chad Franzen: 34:14
So you’re, let’s say you’re, your vision for Atlas Cup becomes a reality sometime in the next five, five years or whatever. How do you hope that change is about the way that people in general, maybe not even competitors, but people in general think about space?
Philip Hover-Smoot: 34:29
Oh, totally. Okay. So sorry. I can go on for hours about this. So, I studied art history.
I think that if you look at the history of media, just any media. We’re talking like literally cave painting back in the Neolithic era, right? Space is part of that, right? The caves at Lascaux, for instance. Right.
Some of the earliest anthropomorphic art ever created on the planet features Orion’s belt. The pyramids at Giza are arranged in a celestial orientation. You look at, you know, the romantic period in Europe. You’ve got, you know, a Starry night. And I mean, pick a spot, right?
It’s an NFT, it’s in video games, right? It’s in Star Trek and Star Wars and The Expanse. It’s everywhere, right? I mean, space and specifically sports in space is, I think, a beautiful, intrinsic emotional connection between two things that kind of capture the magic of what can be. And I have a white paper that’s going to be coming out shortly about this as well.
And probably it’s a little bit too intellectual and academic for the average reader. But like, for me, it’s really important because that is really kind of like the core of why I believe in what I’m doing. And it’s that people watch sports because we want to see the magic of what can be right. It doesn’t matter if you’re watching a midseason baseball game where no one really cares about it, you still want to go watch because God, who knows, right? Maybe you’re going to be at the game where someone hits 100 home runs or he goes into like inning 37 and you break some record, right?
It’s always about what might happen. Now, to be fair, you know, as a Bay area sports fan, like, you know, certainly at some point you get annoyed and just give up watching. But, you know, sometimes you don’t. Right. And I think that’s the same thing with space, right?
It’s one of those intrinsically human things, right? We all have the ability to look up at the night sky. And for many of us, most of us, I think it does instill a sense of wonder. It’s this idea of like, well, oh my God, what does this mean about who we are and where we are and the reality of the immenseness of the cosmos. The idea that, you know, the light coming from the stars is billions of years old.
I mean, I mean, I’ve been in this industry for a long time and for fun, I read a lot of theoretical physics books. It sounds weird to say out loud, but it still is hard for me to wrap my mind around the reality of what looking up at the night sky actually means. And I think it’s really good for the human experience, for the development of the next generation of, you know, young people that are out there trying to figure out how to think about the world, how to think about technology. You know, I think fundamentally we’re two different but yet very similar paths in sport and space that capture the potential of what can be. So, so yeah.
I think again, what I want to see happen is that content creation in space, sports in space capture the attention of the next generation, and we become a means by which people engage with it. Personally, because I think the stuff that happens in space can be good for the people on the planet, right? I’ve launched satellites that count tuna in the South China Sea or look for wildfires in Canada, right? That’s good for people. And it’s sometimes hard for people to understand how space impacts our day to day lives other than like people like, oh, your ATM cards won’t work if GPS goes down.
Sure. That’s accurate, but like, that’s not a helpful talking point. I want all the good stuff that space can do for people on earth to happen. And, and I want that to happen faster by getting people more engaged with space. And I think having the next generation of sports fans realizing that space is a thing.
And frankly, it’s not just a thing. It’s kind of an exciting thing that’s fun to watch and fun to bet on. Great. More engagement is good, right? And that should just, again, creatively benefit everyone over time.
But again, I think really that magic element is, is, is fundamental here. And I think that also comes down to the entertainment quality. The idea of what we’re doing is so immense, right? I mean, we actually filmed a piece with the major television station that’s going to be airing on prime time to about 8 million people in a couple of weeks or months, hopefully in July. Yeah.
No, late June. And, they reached out to us very early on. What you’re doing is insane. And it’s and I think it has this immediate capture of like, well, look, if you can pull this off, people will watch. And I think it’s because of that intrinsic understanding that this is just fundamental human competitive behavior, which is part of who we are from an evolutionary perspective.
And it’s combined with space where we have these graphics that are just the images that are so phenomenally transformative, right? We have, you know, the Earthrise image transformed the environmental movement back in the 70s, right? Like if you just even look at the stuff that NASA just pumps out every single day, like NASA plus kind of people forget that it exists, but they’re creating a huge amount of amazing imagery and video that just kind of like gets pumped on a website and everyone forgets about it, but like, it is absolutely phenomenally beautiful. So we’re just trying to take traditional sport and combine it with some of the most amazing imagery you could possibly imagine. And I think that’s going to capture people’s imaginations in a way that we just really can’t predict.
Chad Franzen: 39:02
Okay. Well, awesome. Hey, Philip, it’s been great to talk to you. Thanks so much for sharing your story and your insights. And we can’t wait to see how this kind of plays out over the next few years.
Thanks so much for joining me today.
Philip Hover-Smoot: 39:14
Yeah, you and me both, Chad. Thanks for having me on.
Chad Franzen: 39:16
So long, everybody.
Outro: 39:17
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