Bala Ramamurthy and the trouble with waiting

A rocket launch has a particular relationship with waiting. Sometimes waiting is the correct decision. Sometimes the weather gets a vote. For Balachandar Ramamurthy, who served as launch chief engineer for SpaceX’s Crew Demo-2 mission, the people inside the spacecraft made that decision personal. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were colleagues he had worked with on difficult engineering problems. They were also friends.

In 2020, the first attempt to launch them was scrubbed after they had boarded. The mission would go on to carry the two astronauts into orbit, returning crewed launches from American soil after nearly a decade. Ramamurthy had spent years helping make that possible. His next chapter would involve another form of waiting: an industrial building ready for work, with too little electricity to do it.

There is a dry joke hidden in the career change. Preparing a rocket to carry people is an assignment most of us would decline before reading the second page. Getting a factory connected to adequate power sounds reassuringly ordinary. Yet ordinary infrastructure can produce extraordinary delays. Ramamurthy’s new company, Critical Loop, was founded in 2023 to help customers operate while permanent grid infrastructure catches up.

The person inside the calculation

Ramamurthy generally goes by Bala. His account of spaceflight has room for the equations and the people. He helped develop the crew escape system and describes launching astronauts on a new rocket as the most exciting moment of his career to that point. Then he adds a sentence that makes the technical résumé feel rather less remote.

“People are the best part of launching rockets.”Bala Ramamurthy

His work extended across propulsion, reliability, fault detection, trajectories and the behavior of rocket explosions. The list sounds like several careers competing for space on one business card. Together, those fields describe a systems engineer’s job: understanding how separate pieces behave when assembled, including when something goes wrong. At SpaceX, he led Falcon 9’s human-rating effort and later served as Director of Flight Safety.

Human-rating required engineering, certification and operational work, rather than one final test with a satisfying green light. His experience included qualifying composite overwrapped pressure vessels and investigating anomalies. He also worked on flight and range safety advances supporting Starship development. The recurring responsibility was to make complex machinery behave within demanding limits, with consequences beyond the machinery itself.

That distinction matters to his story. A rocket can be discussed as a collection of components; a crewed rocket requires thinking about the people entrusted to those components. The engineering work becomes a relationship between physical systems, decisions and responsibility. The same relationship appears, in a different setting, when a customer depends on a power installation to keep a workplace operating.

Antimatter, desert rockets and a sense of play

Before the grid became his business, Ramamurthy’s interests ranged well beyond one launch vehicle. He co-founded a venture exploring engineering applications for antimatter. On his personal site, he describes learning about positrons, an Alpha Centauri-bound machine and the possibilities of an asteroid trucking business. Even interstellar ambition, apparently, eventually encounters logistics.

Those were explorations, rather than a claim that such a journey had been achieved. They reveal the scale of the questions he enjoyed asking. He also led an open source lunar lander development project. The combination is revealing: very distant destinations, and a willingness to work through the practical engineering that would be required to reach them.

His smaller projects carry a similar curiosity. With friends, he has built a mask that translates vision into touch, made a game to teach genetics and launched rockets in the Mojave Desert. He gives this collection the cheerful title “Science is Fun!” It is a useful counterweight to the solemn language that tends to gather around flight safety.

There is no need to manufacture a charming hobby for someone who has already supplied an asteroid trucking business. These projects suggest how he presents himself: interested in testing ideas, comfortable crossing disciplines and pleased to have company while doing it. His own description of engineering joins technical ability with working with people. The machinery and the collaboration belong in the same account.

A long ambition meets an immediate problem

Ramamurthy studied at Anna University in India from 2003 to 2007. His training was in mechanical engineering. His route into aerospace included factory internships in India and work at NASA Ames before joining SpaceX in 2011. He spent twelve years there. This was a career built through physical systems: factories, research work and eventually rockets carrying people.

His ambitions remained expansive. In his personal biography, he connects his career to sustaining and extending human presence in the Solar System. That aspiration gives the energy work a context. A future involving long journeys and complicated settlements still requires understanding materials, information and energy. His interests were broad enough to make an electrical grid a plausible next problem.

The professional recognition followed the spaceflight work. His biography lists the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal and Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy in 2021, followed by the Eagle Manned Mission Award and Karman Fellowship in 2022. Through Karman, he also joined a group commitment to an international student payload program intended to encourage collaboration across countries.

In 2023, Oxford provided a place to consider what came next. As an executive in residence, he met Andrew Grinalds and Lydia Maher, his eventual co-founders. Their discussions turned toward problems they could address with existing technology. Batteries were becoming less expensive. The grid’s ability to accommodate new demand was changing much more slowly. They saw an opening between those two trajectories.

A factory cannot run on a connection date

The founders’ focus was industrial power access. A customer can have a viable site, equipment and a reason to start work, yet face years of waiting for grid upgrades. Critical Loop combines batteries, on-site generation and controls in modular microgrids. The equipment can bridge a delay, and its ability to move gives a temporary installation a second working life elsewhere.

This is the sort of problem whose vocabulary makes it sound less interesting than it is. “Interconnection” is a word that could clear a dinner table. Its consequences are much easier to understand. A factory needs electricity. A charging depot needs electricity. A developer cannot put an estimated completion date into a socket and expect anything useful to happen.

The company’s Cygnus controller coordinates the available sources of power. Its approach puts software and controls alongside the batteries, rather than treating storage as an isolated purchase. An April 2025 Climate Capital conversation described the offering as an integrated system bringing generation, storage and delivery together for customers whose available energy limits their operations.

A September 2026 discussion made the arithmetic concrete: two California industrial sites had approximately five to seven megawatts of utility power available, while their needs were closer to twenty. Because manufacturing operated in shifts, that demand was not constant. Storage could charge when demand was lower and support the heavier working periods, with controls respecting utility limits.

The arithmetic needs that last qualification. A battery does not produce an endless supply of extra electricity. It changes when electricity can be used. A working solution depends on the pattern of demand, the available charging opportunities and, where needed, generation. For a systems engineer, those conditions are the assignment. The interesting work begins after the appealing diagram.

Eight months is a working answer

By April 2026, Critical Loop was reporting installations with consequences a customer could measure. It said it had kept Cover’s manufacturing facility operational for eight months during a utility outage. It had also deployed two hybrid microgrids at Mojave test facilities within days of notice. These are company-reported results, and they give substance to the aim of reducing time to power.

The same announcement described a contract to optimize solar and batteries serving an eleven-megawatt load at San Diego International Airport. An airport brings an especially plain requirement to an engineering meeting: whatever improvements are planned, the power must keep working. It is a setting in which Ramamurthy’s experience with consequential systems has an obvious relevance.

Critical Loop announced a $26 million Series A on April 13, 2026, led by Conifer Infrastructure Partners and Hanover. Total committed equity and debt funding reached $49 million. Funding supplies room to deploy and expand; it also adds obligations. A power company must turn a financing announcement into equipment that operates, service that continues and customers able to get on with their work.

That continuing work is central to the business. Critical Loop offers orchestration across equipment manufacturers, and its public discussions emphasize operations as well as deployment. A battery’s arrival is an event. Keeping the installation useful is a relationship. This is where the founder’s interest in people becomes practical again: somebody must install, operate and maintain what the engineers designed.

The distant destination, the nearby switch

Ramamurthy’s public appearances now span energy panels, industrial power conversations and interviews about grid flexibility. They also retain the older interests. His Oxford spaceflight lecture explored how open source software, available components and ideas from other industries changed spacecraft development. His current work makes a comparable case for bringing engineering practices across an industry boundary.

There is a continuity here without pretending every factory is a rocket. His career has put him in situations where interacting systems have to work, where limits matter and where a technical decision affects other people’s plans. Critical Loop brings those questions down to earth. The destination is closer, and the equipment usually stays on the ground.

He once helped prepare a machine to leave the planet. Now he is helping customers make use of the place they have already chosen. There is something appealingly practical about that turn. A future can be discussed at great length. Eventually, someone has to make sure the power is on.