✦ Meagan Murphy Crawford

Writing

Magic Space Sprinkles

Several years ago I coined the phrase to name the psychology behind the extreme overvaluation of space startups. Send your software to space and the valuation quadruples. License something from NASA and it quadruples again. All sprinkles, no substance.

I didn't coin it as a compliment. I coined it because I had spent years watching the same catastrophe happen over and over to a problem that had no name, and you cannot object in a meeting to a mechanism nobody has named. I made the name a little ridiculous on purpose, because a ridiculous name sticks. Then I wrote the book to put the substance in your hands.

The organizing idea is that the rocket and the cap table obey the same laws. Not similar laws. The same ones. A rocket carries fuel to push the fuel that pushes the rocket, which is the same problem as a burn rate that pays the people whose job is raising the money that pays the burn rate. Max Q, the moment of maximum aerodynamic stress, arrives in the awkward middle rather than at liftoff, and that is the Series B. I built the book that way because physics is the only witness in this business that can't be coached.

Four parts, in the order a vehicle experiences them: Ignition, Ascent, Orbit, Reentry. Forthcoming.

The Sprinkle Test Five questions, counted down from five to one. Who has actually paid you. What does physics charge for this. What happens if your only customer goes away. Who is the next check, and would they take the call today. What melts on reentry. FIVE QUESTIONS · FOUR MINUTES · NO DATABASE 5 Who has actually paid you? Not a memorandum of understanding. Money, out of a real budget, on a specific date. 4 What does physics charge for this? Count the miracles the plan requires, and name them aloud in the room. 3 What happens if your only customer goes away? One customer, one contract, one agency, one launch provider. Remove the failure vectors. 2 Who is the next check, and would they take the call today? A lender, an insurer, a strategic, an acquirer. Name the person, then be honest. 1 What melts on reentry? Every company has one thing that will not survive a data room. Find yours before an analyst does.
At the front of the book are five questions you can run in a meeting in four minutes without a database. They are counted down, because that is the order a launch goes.

White paper

Beyond Venture: Space Needs a Complete Capital Stack

The shortest complete statement of the argument. Its claim is that the bottleneck in this industry has moved from the launchpad to the balance sheet. It traces what follows when the debt and infrastructure tributaries are missing, names the three parties that pay for it, and sets out four things public policy could do about it.

It is the only place a reader sees all five layers in one sitting, and it is the one you can forward without explaining anything.

Read Beyond Venture. Twelve pages on why the bottleneck moved from the launchpad to the balance sheet. Give me a name and an email and the paper opens.

I read every address that comes through here. I do not sell them and I do not add you to anything you did not ask for.

Weekly column

Sprinkles or Substance?Launching September

Each edition takes one headline the industry is breathless about, separates the story from the numbers, and delivers a verdict. Sprinkles, or substance? Every figure comes live out of Off Earth Data, and where a number can't be sourced, the post says so on the page.

The first editions include "The MOU isn't a PO," on the difference between a contract record that carries money and a partnership record that carries adjectives; "The class of 2021, five years on," which walks the space companies that took a public ticker between 2020 and 2022 and asks what actually separated the survivors; and "Nobody posts a render of an antenna farm," on why the quietest companies in this sector are systematically underpriced.

The column will be published at Off Earth Data from mid to late September 2026.

Tell me when it publishes. One email when the first edition goes up, and one a week after that if you want it.

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