space-infrastructure
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Mitchell Fogelson Is Folding a Power Plant Into a Rocket
The Beyond Reach Labs co-founder turned a PhD in deployable structures into a bet on orbital power - and a 16,000-square-foot Brooklyn factory built to make space hardware repeatable.
Halen Mattison
Halen Mattison is the co-founder and CEO of General Galactic, an El Segundo space-propulsion company building Genesis, a water-fueled engine that aims to combine hydrazine-level thrust with xenon-level efficiency. A former SpaceX engineer who worked on propellant generation for Starship, he left after being told his Mars-fuel vision was too long-term, studied at Stanford, and started the company to build the propulsion and propellant infrastructure he believes will become a railroad to Mars. The company raised roughly $9.9M across pre-seed and seed rounds and first emerged converting CO2 into methane on Earth before sharpening its focus on high-agility spacecraft and water-based propulsion.
Pierre-Damien Vaujour
Pierre-Damien Vaujour is the co-founder and CEO of Loft Orbital, the San Francisco-based company that turned satellite deployment from a multi-year aerospace engineering odyssey into something closer to provisioning a cloud server. A French aerospace engineer by training — ISAE-SUPAERO class of 2008, master's from University of Michigan — he cut his teeth at ESA, NASA, the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and was among the first hires at Spire Global before co-founding Loft Orbital in 2017 with Alex Greenberg and Antoine de Chassy. Under his leadership, the company reached unicorn status in January 2025 with a $170M Series C, surpassed $500M in cumulative bookings, and is now building the default AI execution layer for orbital infrastructure.
Ignacio Montero
Ignacio Belieres Montero is the founder and CEO of Epic Aerospace, a Los Altos, California-based company building orbit transfer vehicles and space tugs that move satellites from one orbit to another. A Stanford aerospace engineering graduate and Y Combinator S19 alum, he started building rockets at 16 and founded Epic Aerospace in 2017. The company's CHIMERA LEO 1 launched aboard SpaceX Transporter 6 in January 2023, and CHIMERA GEO 1 launched on SpaceX's Intuitive Machines-2 mission in February 2025, reaching 53 million kilometers from Earth. Epic Aerospace reached $4.2M in annual revenue in 2024 with a 28-person team, pioneering non-toxic hypergolic propulsion technology for cost-effective in-space transportation.
Chris Biddy
Chris Biddy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Astro Digital, a California-founded aerospace company that has delivered 35+ satellites and operates 10+ missions in orbit. A mechanical engineer by training (M.S., Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Biddy steered Astro Digital from an Earth observation startup into a full Mission-as-a-Service platform - cutting the cost, schedule risk, and complexity barrier for organizations wanting to put hardware in space. He previously led engineering at Canopus Systems, and has been active in the commercial smallsat movement since its early commercial days.