Building the World’s First Professional Sport in Space With Philip Hover-Smoot of Atlas Cup

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Create multiple measures of competitive excellence: Look beyond a single definition of winning by rewarding accuracy, efficiency, speed, communication, and other measurable performance indicators.
4. 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.
5. 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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