Margo
de Naray

The solar cells on most spacecraft today are made from gallium arsenide - expensive, brittle, dependent on a supply chain that runs through a handful of foundries, and degraded by the very radiation environment they operate in. The standard fix is overengineering: build them thick, build them expensive, hope for the best. Margo de Naray's company has a different answer, and it weighs almost nothing.

Solestial makes ultrathin silicon solar cells that self-cure radiation damage at temperatures as low as 65°C - roughly the heat of a hot cup of coffee. That's not a marketing claim. It's a physical property of the silicon heterojunction architecture the company's founders discovered during NASA-funded research at Arizona State University in 2015. What de Naray walked into when she became CEO in May 2025 was a company that had already proven the science. Her job: prove the manufacturing.

That's a distinction worth holding onto. De Naray is not a scientist. She's an operator - someone who has spent two decades taking technically complex things and making them at scale. Intel's semiconductor fabs. Cargill's global aquaculture nutrition business. Astra Space's electric propulsion line. Each one required different domain knowledge, different supply chains, different customers. Each one required the same underlying skill: understanding production systems well enough to make them faster, cheaper, more reliable.

The résumé looks strange at first glance. A University of Michigan industrial engineering graduate who went to MIT for a dual master's in systems engineering and business, then spent two years on Intel's manufacturing floor before pivoting to Cargill's animal nutrition division - specifically managing a fish feed business operating across Norway and international markets. Then, in 2022, a hard left turn into commercial space.

At Astra Space, she served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Space Products and Services, leading the Hall effect thruster program through a period when Astra itself was navigating serious business turbulence. Hall effect thrusters are essentially plasma-based rocket engines for spacecraft - technically demanding, precision-manufactured, sold to customers who can't tolerate failure. Running that business meant managing the gap between cutting-edge physics and reliable production. Sound familiar?

When Astra's original CEO Stanislau Herasimenka stepped aside to become CTO and focus on product development, Solestial brought in de Naray to run the commercial and operational side. The timing was deliberate. The company had just closed its $17 million Series A round led by AE Ventures, opened a 30,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Tempe, Arizona, and was targeting 1 megawatt of annual space solar production. That goal requires a different kind of leader than a research-stage startup. It requires someone who has actually run a factory.

The commercial case for Solestial's technology is compelling in a way that requires context. Traditional spacecraft solar cells use III-V multijunction designs - layers of gallium indium phosphide, gallium arsenide, and germanium, epitaxially grown, outrageously expensive, and manufactured by a small number of specialized suppliers with lead times measured in months. For the New Space economy - companies building constellations of small, low-cost satellites - that supply chain is a fundamental bottleneck. A single satellite solar array can cost more than the launch itself.

Solestial's silicon approach uses commodity materials processed through automated production lines - closer in spirit to how terrestrial solar panels are made than how spacecraft components traditionally are. The self-annealing property means the cells recover from radiation damage during normal spacecraft operation, without any active management. That combination - low material cost, automated manufacturing, built-in resilience - is what produces the roughly 90% cost reduction the company claims.

Under de Naray's leadership, the company moved quickly. In July 2025, Solestial won a $1.2 million Direct-to-Phase II contract from SpaceWERX - the U.S. Space Force's innovation arm - to develop a fast-to-manufacture multiorbital solar array wing for small satellites. The "direct to phase II" designation skips the typical proof-of-concept phase, indicating the government considered Solestial's technology sufficiently proven to fund at scale. By January 2026, the company had acquired manufacturing equipment from Meyer Burger, the Swiss solar equipment manufacturer, enabling complete in-house processing from silicon wafer to finished solar cell.

That last detail matters more than it might seem. Vertical integration in manufacturing is a forcing function. It forces a company to understand every step of its production process - and to own the quality at each step. It also eliminates supplier dependencies that can constrain output or quality. For a company whose central value proposition is scalable, cost-effective manufacturing, owning the full production stack is not a luxury. It's the point.

De Naray lives in Alameda, California - across the bay from San Francisco, not in Tempe where Solestial's factory sits. That's not unusual for a startup CEO leading a geographically distributed team. What's unusual is the specific combination of backgrounds she brings: manufacturing engineer, global agribusiness executive, commercial space operator, now space solar CEO. Each career chapter seems unlikely from the previous one. Together, they form something coherent: a person who finds the hardest manufacturing scaling problem in a given industry and tries to solve it.

The space solar market is expanding fast. Satellite constellations - for communications, Earth observation, navigation, intelligence - are multiplying. Each new spacecraft needs power. For decades, the answer has been gallium arsenide. Margo de Naray is betting that silicon, properly engineered and properly manufactured, can take that market. She's done harder things before.