space-logistics
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Ashi Dissanayake Wants Spacecraft to Stop Dying of Thirst
She built rockets, made a desk out of whatever the apartment could spare, and applied to Y Combinator four times. Now her company's first hardware has worked in orbit - one precise turn toward a future where spacecraft can pull over and refuel.
Matija Milenovic Is Turning the Worst Delivery of His Life Into a 15-Minute Rocket Hop
A 23-hour hand delivery taught the aerospace engineer that the fastest machines on Earth still depend on very slow logistics. Now his second startup is trying to put urgent cargo on a suborbital shortcut.
Payton Case Is Building the Delivery Truck for Orbit
After learning to cool computers with liquid nitrogen and build geostationary satellites at scale, the Dispatch co-founder has picked a wonderfully terrestrial problem in space: getting the cargo home.
Dispatch
Dispatch is a San Francisco hard-tech startup building the return leg of the space economy. Founded by ex-Astranis engineers, it develops refurbishable reentry vehicles and uncrewed, autonomous space stations so that pharmaceutical, semiconductor, and biotech companies can manufacture ultra-high-value materials in microgravity and bring them home affordably. Its first vehicle, Spark 1, targets a demonstration flight in 2027, and the team has already tested a full-scale Mach 20+ heat shield built roughly 100x cheaper than incumbents.
Reditus Space
Reditus Space is an Atlanta-based aerospace startup building reusable spacecraft that carry payloads to low Earth orbit and return them safely to the ground. Its first vehicle, ENOS, is a free-flying reentry capsule designed to host commercial and research payloads for roughly two months in microgravity before splashing down for recovery and reuse. Founded in 2024 by Georgia Tech aerospace engineers Stef Crum and Will Sherman, the company sells 'microgravity as a service' and routine 'downmass' - the return of materials from orbit - to pharmaceutical, semiconductor, biotech, and defense customers.
Spaceium Inc.
Spaceium is a Y Combinator (S24) aerospace startup building unmanned refueling and servicing stations in orbit - what its founders call service stations along a 'space superhighway.' Its proprietary cryogenic storage system holds multiple metric tons of fuel for up to a decade in orbit without boil-off, and its high-precision robotic arm transfers propellant and performs repairs. The goal is to let spacecraft top up in space instead of carrying all their fuel from launch, extending missions and lowering costs for satellites, orbital transfer vehicles, and eventual Moon and Mars missions.
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.
Varda Space Industries
Varda Space Industries builds spacecraft that manufacture materials in microgravity and bring them back to Earth inside autonomous reentry capsules. The El Segundo company is best known for crystallizing pharmaceuticals in orbit - it grew crystals of the HIV drug ritonavir on its first mission - and for selling its capsules as hypersonic test platforms to the U.S. government. With its W-series vehicles, Varda is trying to turn low Earth orbit into a working factory floor and a routine, high-cadence delivery service back to the planet's surface.