The Phoenix Returns

The question landed quietly. It was 2023, in a Los Angeles conference room at The Economist's first State of the Space Economy summit, and around the table sat about fifty in-space manufacturing companies: biotech, advanced materials, the full frontier. One by one they explained how they would change the world.

Then a banker raised his hand. Which of you can get to space, finish your work and bring it home, without the U.S. government's help?

Andrew J. Parlock remembers the silence exactly. "Fifty companies represented from all over the world," he says. "Zero hands. Zero hands went up."

He had been carrying a version of that problem since 2018. Now he could see how big it was. An entire industry was getting ready to make valuable things in orbit, and none of it had a dependable way to bring them back to the people who would buy them. That afternoon, he says, "was the moment Space Phoenix was born."

This is a story about the unglamorous middle of the space economy, and why it may decide who profits from everything else. Getting to orbit has become routine. Getting back has not. A founding couple from Baltimore is betting that whoever solves the return trip becomes infrastructure for everyone else. They also believe their city, which grew rich moving freight, should be where that happens. For investors who want their money to do some good, the question is simple: can a logistics company speed up the medicines, materials and research that orbit makes possible?

Space logistics, explained in four steps

THE PRIMER

To see why that silence mattered, it helps to take the problem apart one piece at a time.

Put simply, about four-fifths of what flies in Andrew's example is the vehicle, not the mission. Take that away and trying something in space gets cheaper, so more people try.

The engineer and the process-builder

THE FOUNDERS

Andrew Parlock says he was an aerospace engineer "by birth." His parents, not sure what to do with him, bought him science kits, and he set things on fire. He took apart every lawnmower the family owned and got most of them back together. He built his own computers before kids did that. By 2018 he was managing advanced payload programs at Northrop Grumman, and several startups came after that.

He talks in bursts, jokes at his own expense, and keeps handing out credit. "My team's always saying, Andrew, you're so innovative," he says. "And I tell them it's because you're all behind me that I'm able to stand at the tip of the spear."

Kendra Parlock is the counterweight. Born in Baltimore, she spent childhood summers on the 2500 block of West Baltimore Street. She and Andrew met in business school. The Baltimore Museum of Industry has honored her as a Modern Industrialist, and today she is Space Phoenix's Chief Revenue Officer. Much of the company's strategy, and nearly all of its process, comes from her.

She calls herself a newcomer to space. "My perception was that this is for others," she says. "Bigger organizations. People who've done more. Once-in-a-lifetime." That changed. "Now it's about right now. It's about infrastructure. It's about making it accessible. And it's not about others. It's about us."

Their partnership is easy to describe. "I present to Kendra with almost pure chaos," Andrew says, "and Kendra has a way of reflecting it back in a process-focused way." Once a week they go out to dinner to reconnect, as husband and wife and as co-founders.

The company started with one of those conversations. After the Los Angeles roundtable, Andrew told his manager at the time that the market was begging for logistics. "That conversation went over like a lead balloon." That weekend he took the idea home, expecting Kendra to ask about money, risk and process.

She asked one question.

"If not now, when?"KENDRA PARLOCK, CO-FOUNDER & CRO

"It always makes me a little emotional," Andrew says.

Kendra sees the moment as a matter of timing. They aren't typical founders. "We've got some gray hair," she says. In her view the idea could only work at this point in their lives, with their marriage, their education and their networks all in place. Andrew saw the problem years earlier, she says, but they couldn't have solved it any sooner. The first question was about timing. The second is about who.

"If not us, then who?"KENDRA PARLOCK

The thesis: New Space 3.0

THE BIG IDEA

Andrew divides the industry's recent history bluntly enough to annoy some peers. "I'm going to get in a lot of trouble for saying this," he says, "but we fundamentally have not changed how we send stuff to space since the '50s." Rockets got cheaper and computers got smaller, he says, but the model stayed the same.

New Space 3.0 depends on one idea, which Andrew credits to Kendra: if we can't return it, we can't scale it. A drug crystal grown in microgravity is worth something only after it reaches a lab on Earth. A satellite that can't be serviced or brought home ends up as debris. Down mass, as Andrew puts it, is permanent.

How big is the prize?

TAM, SAM AND SOM, EXPLAINED

Investors size a market as three nested rings. The terms sound technical, but the idea is simple, and the Parlocks' favorite comparison makes it easy. Picture a delivery company.

• TAM, the total addressable market, is everything that moves anywhere: every container ship, freight train and parcel on Earth.
• SAM, the serviceable available market, is the part its trucks and planes can actually carry: parcels, not oil tankers.
• SOM, the serviceable obtainable market, is the share of those parcels it can realistically win over the next several years, against everyone else on the road.

TAM tells you whether a market matters. SAM tells you whether the company is aimed at it. SOM tells you whether the plan holds up.

Andrew's math is cautious on purpose. He starts from the multi-trillion-dollar view, cuts it by a factor of four, and asks investors a simple question: "Are you happy if I get 1% of the market? Are you happy if I get 2%? We know the answer."

What the rings tell an impact investor:

1. The market is real and growing. The space economy hit a record $613B in 2024, up 7.8% on the year, and 78% of it was commercial.²
2. Few companies serve the middle ring. By the founders' count only 10–12 companies worldwide are working on two-way logistics. When a market is large and has few suppliers, even a small share adds up.
3. Timing is the real unknown. Industry reporting notes that nothing manufactured in space is on store shelves yet, while return capsules are being scheduled at a faster clip.³ The size of the prize is clearer than how soon it arrives.

Peers, not rivals

THE LANDSCAPE

Ask Andrew about competition and he says there isn't any. He admits investors roll their eyes. His point is that the problem is far bigger than the number of companies trying to solve it. "It's all hands on deck."

He cares about the distinctions. Stoke brings its second stage back, he notes, "but not down mass. Important distinction." He calls Varda "the first ones to do it." In February 2024 Varda's W-1 capsule became the first commercial spacecraft to land on U.S. soil, after crystallizing an HIV drug in orbit.⁵ Yet Varda describes itself as a biotech company, and Andrew asks why a biotech company builds spacecraft. "Because they had to." Space Phoenix exists so the next company won't have to.

What a round trip makes possible

THE IMPACT CASE

Kendra doesn't talk about the stakes in terms of rockets. "It's about advancing humanity," she says, "making access to cures for cancer more accessible, cures for blindness, demonstrating data centers in space to address the concerns here on Earth."

One example is LambdaVision, founded by Nicole Wagner, which is developing retinal implants built layer by layer in microgravity to treat blindness. "This is literally the land of science fiction, made real," Andrew says. "She's a brilliant, brilliant scientist. But now she needs logistics."

The impact logic fits in one sentence: breakthroughs that orbit makes possible are held back by the lack of a way home.

The case, the risks, the way in

FOR IMPACT INVESTORS

1. Infrastructure, not a single bet. Space Phoenix doesn't have to pick which space-made drug or material wins. It serves all of them, the way the railroad served every factory along the line.
2. Friction is the lever. "If we eliminate the friction of getting to space, if we eliminate the friction of return, how many researchers, how many manufacturers, how many companies, universities, governments would then get involved?" Andrew asks. "We eliminate friction, we inflect."
3. The bottleneck is moving to return. The founders expect launch capacity to widen through 2028–2029. As getting up gets easier, getting back becomes the constraint. "We're at the front of the bottleneck."

The ecosystem play. The founders' view of "logistics" keeps widening. Planned next steps include a Maryland payload-integration facility, the ground base where customer payloads would be prepared for flight, subject to funding. International joint ventures would carry the model to new markets. Andrew also names the next layers of demand: uncrewed stations, cislunar logistics and orbital cleanup. The goal, as Kendra puts it, is "Baltimore and beyond."

How to support the mission:

Baltimore and beyond

THE SUCCESS STORY

There are more obvious places to build a space company. The Parlocks chose home.

"Baltimore and beyond," Kendra says. "Baltimore very much being the foundation, the heart." The company held its public launch in the city in May. It has a dozen employees, team members and partners abroad, and a growing list of international conversations. In Kendra's telling, the local story and the global story are the same story.

The city has history on its side. Baltimore is a port, and in 1828 construction began there on the B&O, America's first steam-operated common-carrier railroad.⁶ It sits inside the Maryland–Washington corridor of hospitals, universities, government and defense. "Baltimore's a city known for moving things," Andrew says. "We're the next generation of moving those things. The picks, shovels and railroad tracks for the next industrial revolution."

For Kendra, it comes back to the stoop, the white marble front steps of a Baltimore row house. The couple throws a party on theirs every year. "From this Baltimore stoop," she says, "it's a lesson in how you bring people together, how you build an ecosystem, how you create true, meaningful partnership. That's what we've learned here, and we're going to share that with the rest of the world."

"It's not just about how Baltimore has the opportunity to be part of the new space economy. It's how the new space economy should be built in Baltimore."KENDRA PARLOCK

The day space stops being special

THE VISION

Ask Andrew what success looks like and he describes a world that has stopped talking about space.

"You'll just have a battery in your laptop that lasts three weeks, and it just so happens those carbon nanotubes were produced in space," he says. "You won't say, this was a space cancer treatment. You'll just say, my cancer was treated." Nobody calls a shipment "ocean-made," he points out. Maybe there will be a small Made in Space sticker on the bottom. That would be nice, but it isn't the point.

He'd like his own industry to lighten up, too. The accepted edge of space, the Kármán line, is about 62 miles up.⁷ "I'm closer to space than I am to Philly right now," he says. "In one aspect we need to loosen up a little bit. In another aspect, we need to tighten up the vision."

Why Phoenix

THE NAME

Ask the founders where the name came from and you get several answers.

The Parlocks have been through more than one reinvention in their careers. The team, "engine nerds to the core," in Andrew's words, took to Greek mythology, which is how the vehicles came to be called Hermes, Athena and Zeus. Then Kendra adds one more reason: the Phoenix was her high school mascot.

After seventy years of getting very good at going up, the next chapter of the space industry may belong to whoever builds the way home. In Baltimore, two founders who asked if not now, when? and if not us, then who? have decided that will be them.

So, one last time: why Phoenix?

Andrew had answered before any of the other reasons came out.