This Singapore misfit is now kickstarting Australia’s space industry

Brian Lim was destined to be a bottom feeder in Singapore. His secondary school was in the bottom ten for the Normal stream – a classification for students who are less adept at scoring in examinations. And the paper chase was all that mattered: the system treated him as someone residing in the lowest rung of society.

“Whenever I talked about silly ideas, I was told to sit down. I didn’t pass my ‘O’ Levels, and got kicked out of polytechnic after my first year,” he says. Like any child, Lim had wild dreams: he wanted to be an astronaut.

The education system didn’t take him seriously. In secondary school, he told his physics teacher that he wanted to learn about quantum mechanics. The teacher said that the subject didn’t exist in the curriculum. In polytechnic, Lim talked to his professors about how to build a space ship, but they dismissed him. He had to sneak off to a conference in the National University of Singapore to learn about it.

Lim did badly in school because it bored him. “I was always asking hard questions that nobody could answer. Around 16 years old, I wasted a whole cartridge worth of printer ink to print every document I could get from NASA. These were great for reading but they didn’t give me what I needed: the math and science that nobody could teach me.”

Most people give up on their childhood dreams as they grow up, and Lim did for a long time. But now, he’s a lot closer than most of us to achieving it.

Reclaiming his childhood

Lim put his dream aside because he found it impossible to achieve in Singapore. “And like most Singaporeans who didn’t do well, I came to Australia to study,” he says, since Australian universities are easier to get into compared to Singapore’s top institutions. “The only difference is, I didn’t go back.”

He was a geek. He did his degree and Master’s in computer networking, wrote half a dozen papers on medical sensor networks and in remote health monitoring. The problem was that it was “absolutely boring.” He founded six startups, ranging from brain scanning, tele-education, to software-defined networking, but all failed.

Two years ago, he bumped into one of the lecturers at the International Space University, an organization that teaches the basics of space to students around the world.

The best part: it didn’t need anyone to have a PhD in physics. Lim forked out his own money to sit for five weeks of classes, and he was excited to get involved in the space industry at last. But Australia was a desert for space entrepreneurs. While Sydney has a growing startup scene, most of them were internet-related.

“I was upset about a week or two. But I realized there’s an opportunity that nobody else sees. So either I’m a madman or a genius for spotting it. So I said, let’s give it a try.”

He joined Singularity University, a Silicon Valley organization that wants to use technology to solve global challenges that will impact a billion people in ten years. It’s an educational institution and startup accelerator rolled into one.

Without revealing specifics, Lim says he’s working on a project at the institution that would use space in ways that don’t exist or haven’t been conceived yet.

Today, Lim runs a startup in Australia called Launchbox, a company that wants to build and launch a satellite into space. It also promotes space engineering to students with a micro satellite kit that lets them build their own satellite. Launchbox would then send the kit into the stratosphere and students can watch it land after it releases a parachute.

Failing with pride