space-domain-awareness
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Melanie Stricklan Knows Why Space Is Getting Small
A West Texas childhood led Melanie Stricklan to surveillance aircraft, a space startup, and the crowded business of keeping satellites apart. Now the Slingshot Aerospace co-founder is bringing that experience to national security programs at Vast.
Eric Ingram and the useful art of getting out of the way
Eric Ingram built Scout Space to help spacecraft understand their surroundings. After five years as CEO, he began a different kind of navigation: finding the right moment to hand over the controls.
Kelli Furrer Is Selling the Story That Makes Space Make Sense
After fifteen years at Dell and a founder turn in public-sector AI, Kelli Furrer took on a stranger brief: make the crowded space above us understandable, useful, and worth acting on.
Josiah Gruber
Josiah Gruber is the CEO of Scout Space, a Reston, Virginia company building sensors and software to detect, track and characterize objects in orbit. An optical and RF remote-sensing engineer with more than 15 years of hands-on experience, he joined Scout in 2023 as an engineer, rose to VP of Engineering and then CTO, and took the top job in late 2025. Under his leadership Scout raised an $18M Series A in May 2026 and is putting its Owl optical payload on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft.
Johannes Galatsanos
Johannes Galatsanos is Co-Founder and CEO of Diffraqtion, a Boston-based quantum imaging startup that has built a quantum camera capable of recovering 95% of photon information lost by conventional sensors - translating to 20x higher resolution and 1,000x faster image processing than any existing optical system. A multilingual MIT and Oxford graduate with Greek-German roots, Galatsanos pivoted from leading AI and data transformation at Novartis to commercializing a decade of DARPA- and NASA-backed quantum photonics research. Diffraqtion won first prize at SLUSH 2025, secured a $4.2M pre-seed round in January 2026, and is targeting satellite launches for space domain awareness and Earth observation by 2028-2029.
Ron Faith
Ron Faith is the President and CEO of RBC Signals, a Redmond, Washington company that runs a global ground station network letting satellite operators downlink data on demand instead of building their own dishes. A serial entrepreneur who launched Apple's first standalone internet product in the mid-1990s, ran mobile commerce at Qpass, and led cloud data-protection startup Datacastle to an acquisition by Carbonite, he returned to his aerospace roots in 2019 and took the top job in January 2024. He pairs a Dartmouth engineering-and-philosophy double major with a University of Washington master's spent researching frequency selective surfaces for Boeing.
Even Rogers
Even 'Jolly' Rogers is the co-founder and CEO of True Anomaly, the first company built exclusively around space superiority for U.S. national security. A former Air Force space operations officer and Weapons School graduate who helped write the U.S. military's foundational space doctrine, he left uniform and 12 days later started building autonomous spacecraft and mission software for combat in orbit. Under his leadership True Anomaly raised a $650M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.2B valuation, crossing $1B in total funding.