Mr. Platzker at Seattle's Space Needle.

"The old paradigm that I'm trying to get rid of is that space is for governments and the super-rich, and it takes years, and it costs millions of dollars, and I say this is just wrong" said Peter Platzer, an Austrian-born former CERN physicist and hedge fund quant who was in town to promote his start-up NanoSatisfi. "It's the democratization of innovation. We're going to let people write their own space experiments."

Mr. Platzer's idea is this: Equip a small satellite with an open-source processor (Arduino, if you're into that sort of thing) and 25 sensors, including a camera, Geiger counter, spectrometer, etc.; Launch the thing into orbit; Rent space on the satellite to anyone with a few hundred dollars, the ability to write some simple code and the desire to play in the heavens. From there the possibilities are endless: Amateur astronomers, budding physicists, video game designers or hopeless romantics could find a use for the service, Mr. Platzer said:

"You could program the satellite to send your girlfriend a text message from space. 'Happy birthday, I love you.' Once you put the power of space into the hands of the people, who knows what they'll come up with."

For Mr. Platzer, the project represents the convergence of lifelong interests. Born in Vienna and trained as a physicist at the Max Plank Institute and CERN—European Organization for Nuclear Research—he feared that the slow-pace of the space bureaucracy would prevent him from getting meaningful work done, and decamped for the private sector. He traveled the world for Boston Consulting Group before earning an MBA at Harvard Business School and building quantitative trading programs for a series of investment funds, including Deutsche Bank and The Rohatyn Group. Technology advanced, and private money began to find its way into space exploration, and Mr. Platzer saw a chance to rekindle his early passion. He enrolled at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and began developing the project that would become NanoSatisfi.

With the Kickstarter launching today—he's hoping to raise $35,000, but says he'll launch the first satellite regardless of whether he meets that goal—Mr. Platzer sat down with The Observer to talk about his path from Wall Street to the edge of the final frontier.

You were trained as a physicist, but spent the bulk of your post-graduate years in finance. What happened?

Did I always want to do space? Yes. When I was finishing my physics degree, and I vividly remember someone telling me the story of a scientist who worked on an instrument for 15 years so that he could get data and write a paper and get tenure, and then when the instrument got launched, the rocket blew up, and with that his career went out the window. I didn't want to go into a field if I didn't see a potential other than to be massively frustrated.

So management consulting...

I got hooked on the idea that you can take large, amorphous problems and break them down into pieces that you can than solve and put back together again, because that's exactly what you do as a physicist. Why is a bird flying? It's not concrete, so you break it down—what forces are working on the bird—and then you build a model from that and you can start making predictions and see if they come true. And that's what management consultants do.

And from there to quantitative trading...

I was working on the Singapore Stock Exchange, and I was doing a lot of capital markets analysis, doing a lot of research into understanding that whole universe. I remember, I was walking down the street in Singapore, and I said, wouldn't it be fun to write a computer program to trade the stock market? I said, 'That's way too much fun, it can't be possible. Stop dreaming Peter.' Two years later I'm sitting in Harvard Business School, and we go around and introduce ourselves. So I tell my story, and the next person over introduced himself and said, for the last six months I've been writing a program to trade the markets.

Needless to say, we started talking, and four months later we started a company to do exactly that.

What's different about Space now?

You feel it stronger in the Valley than here, but there is a huge push to the private sector. Money starts to be available. If you were to ask NASA today, 'How long will it take to put a man on the moon?' They'd tell you, 'Give us 25 years and half-trillion dollars.' And in the '60s, when they had nothing, it took them eight or nine years to do the same thing. They could not do today what Elon Musk just did. It's like the Bannister mile has been broken. No one thought you could break a 4-minute mile, and then Bannister did it and within six months, six other people did it.

OK, so we can rent some space on your nanosatellite. What then?

You can do really cool things with earth observation with nanosatellites, such as mapping the ocean temperature, mapping rainforests, atmospheric density, space weather. One of the experiments that I would want to run is measure the magnetosphere, which shields us from solar radiation, to get a sense of the shape of the earth's magnetic field. I think people will want to take pictures of planet—hobby astronomy is a $100 million business every year.

But I purposefully don't try to think about it. If I had asked you in 2008, how many applications will be on the App Store, what are people going to do with it, I doubt we would have come up with even a fraction of the 600,000 applications that people invented. Maybe Brad Pitt wants to buy Angelina Jolie her own personal satellite. He buys her all sorts of other crazy things.

Elon Musk (Getty Images)

SpaceX, the brainchild of designer and C.E.O. Elon Musk, suffered a setback early Saturday after its Dragon cargo ship, destined for the International Space Station (I.S.S.), made it all the way to "lift-off" then failed to actually lift off. The BBC reports the ship's computers indicated the Falcon rocket set to boost the Dragon into orbit indicated a problem with "chamber pressure in one of the nine Merlin engines."

Mr. Musk's firm has a contract worth a billion dollars with N.A.S.A. to ferry supplies to the space station. SpaceX is but one firm hoping to fill the void left by N.A.S.A.'s retirement of the space shuttle program. If the Dragon lifts off successfully within the next few days it will mark the first time a private company has  serviced the I.S.S.

Mr. Musk, a South African inventor who co-founded PayPal, tweeted about the failure:

Launch aborted: slightly high combustion chamber pressure on engine 5. Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 19, 2012

The next launch window is Tuesday.

The Associated Press posted a slightly depressing video of the aborted launch on Youtube Saturday morning.

So when she conducted a video interview for Yahoo with Elon Musk, the futurist in chief behind fledgling electric car company Tesla, she was on familiar ground. Very familiar!

At the top of the interview, Ms. Lacy brings up a Randall Stross column that had appeared in the Sunday Business section of The Times in November, titled “Only the Rich Can Afford It. Should Taxpayers Back It?”

“Randy Stross is a huge douche bag,” said Mr. Musk.

Ms. Lacy let out a long, loud belly laugh.

“And an idiot,” he continued.

More guffawing.

“It was funny!” said Ms. Lacy in an interview later. “It was something you don’t expect a CEO to say.”

Or a reporter to laugh out loud about in front of her audience? Mr. Musk continued to tee off on Mr. Stross, and wondered aloud how anyone who lived in Silicon Valley could produce such a story. “Well,” said Ms. Lacy, who began to chuckle again, “a lot of people agree with you.” It didn’t take much to know where she stood.

“There was a huge outpouring of letters to the editor, and actually, I should point out, that The New York Times printed a retraction,” he continued.

“Oh, did they?” she asked.

“Of course, when they print retractions, it’s on page 27—like micro-fine,” he said, prompting more laughter from Ms. Lacy. “They actually printed a retraction, yeah.”

Actually, they didn’t.

In Mr. Stross’ column, he complains that Tesla Motors is looking for $400 million in federal loans as part of a $25 billion loan package for automakers that was passed last year. Mr. Stross was disgusted by this since the money would be used to fund a company that sells expensive cars, and in particular, the Tesla Roadster, which sells for $109,000. The only problem is when Tesla asked for the federal money, it didn’t ask for money to fund the $109,000 car, but for a much more affordable sedan that, after tax credits, would cost only $50,000.

A correction—not a retraction—ran and the headline was softened. (It changed from “Only the Rich Can Afford It. Should Taxpayers Back It?” to “Should Taxpayers Back a High-End Electric Carmaker?”)

Times editors were less than thrilled with what Mr. Musk said on the Yahoo video, but they were even less happy with Ms. Lacy—she never called them for reaction, and her interview manner didn’t really help her cause.

“I think Sarah Lacy was too busy giggling to do Journalism 101 and call Randy or me for comment to make sure what Elon was saying was accurate,” said Tim O’Brien, the Sunday Business editor of The Times, in an interview. “Because it was not only inaccurate, it was flat-out wrong. We wrote a clarification of the headline. We didn’t retract the story at all; we stood firmly by the story, and I still stand by Randy’s column.”

“You can’t help but watch that interview and marvel at the squishy familiarity between Lacy and Musk,” he continued. “And I wonder whether or not some journalistic blinders had popped off.”

Mr. O’Brien said that the story first caught his attention when he saw it pop up on—where else?—Twitter on Friday.

“I saw the headline and it said something like ‘Elon calls NYT writer Randall Stross a douche bag’ and I was like whoa-ho!” he said. “I clicked on it and there it was. It was so ridiculous that it was entertaining. It was so misguided and inaccurate and I was stunned at the poor quality of the journalism.”

“Look, at the end of the day, Elon was the one who said stuff, and I was interviewing him,” Ms. Lacy said when we told her what Mr. O’Brien had said. “I think it’s embarrassing that The Times would try to throw me under the bus because they did shoddy reporting that they wound up correcting. If they want to throw me under the bus to make up for their own column that they massively rewrote, you know, go for it.”

Technically, the column was not massively rewritten—it had one sentence removed and one was massaged in order to fix the error.

But that was plenty to Ms. Lacy.

“It was not just a correction,” she said. “But come on, guys: It’s just embarrassing. To me, it’s embarrassing to turn this around as a story on me. Yeah, I’m a girl and I’m a reporter. Go ahead and throw me under the bus if that makes you feel better. I think it’s just embarrassing.

“I don’t know why it’s O.K. for Randall Stross to have an opinion and then it’s not O.K. for me to have an opinion when I basically have the same job,” she continued.

Ms. Lacy spent years as a Business Week reporter, but now she spends her time doing videos for Yahoo, serving as editor at large for TechCrunch—a Web site that very much played up Ms. Lacy’s “douche bag” scoop—and doing other contract jobs.

Last year, at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, Ms. Lacy got the honor of interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. She interrupted him a bit. CNET described her performance this way: “[O]n-stage interviewer Sarah Lacy out-and-out bombed, becoming much more of the story than she should have been and having the capacity crowd turn on her over the course of the hour discussion.”

When we asked her if she regretted her interview style with Mr. Musk, she said, “It obviously caught me off guard. I started laughing.” And she added that she had “nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I think all reporters are perfectionists,” she continued. “You can’t point to any interview that was absolutely perfect. I think everyone has their own style in interacting. I think everyone has their own style in journalism. Look, I’m a girl from the South! Sometimes I laugh. Someone can pejoratively call it giggling. But if you look at the body of my work, I ask lots of hard questions, and break a lot of hard news.”

Update, April 15, 10:00 a.m.: This story has been updated since last night to reflect that Ms. Lacy's interview with Mark Zuckerberg took place at 2008's South by Southwest Interactive conference.

jkoblin@observer.com