In 1995, he joined Kistler Aerospace in Kirkland Washington, one of the early space startups developing a fully reusable two stage launch vehicle to serve the emerging LEO communications market.
Andrews then led the Kistler propulsion system development contracts with Pratt & Whitney and Aerojet, and went on to manage the K-1 vehicle integration team located in El Segundo, California.
[8] In 2007 the firm diversified into space hardware and acquired Automated Controlled Environments Inc (ACEi), a company focused on nanosat subsystems.
[9] Andrews was one of the first people to identify and articulate the “killer app” for cubesats and nanosats: deployment of swarms of spacecraft to observe the planet in near real time.
[16] In 2013 Andrews founded BlackSky Global LLC to build the infrastructure to observe the planet in real time with a constellation of 1 meter resolution satellites to provide near real time observations (giving revisit rates measured in hours or minutes versus days) to complement existing high resolution spacecraft.
[17] Two weeks after the GeoInt Conference a SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded in flight,[citation needed] significantly delaying the launch of the Pathfinder spacecraft.
Coincident with this event, Spaceflight Industries closed a $21.5 million Series B investment led by venture capital firms Vulcan and RRE.
[31] In March 2018 Spaceflight Industries closed a $150 million Series C investment led by Thales Alenia Space (TAS)[32] and Mitsui[33] to fund the construction and launch of twenty (20) BlackSky spacecraft.