space-robotics
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Justin Cyrus Had a Rover on the Moon. Then Gravity Had Other Plans.
A domain-name gift at age five became a Colorado robotics company with hardware on three worlds. After a lunar landing that trapped his rover upside down, Cyrus did what engineers do: read the data, redraw the machine and book the next ride.
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.
Deborah Theobald
Deborah Theobald is the co-founder and CEO of b Inc. (formerly Vecna Technologies), a Burlington, Massachusetts company building telepresence robots and automation for healthcare, education, government, and tourism. An MIT-trained aerospace engineer with a master's in space robotics, she has spent more than two decades turning research-grade robotics into tools that help people connect and get care. She also founded VecnaCares, a charitable venture deploying health-record technology in low-resource settings across Africa, Haiti, and beyond. Her guiding belief: technology should serve humanity, not overshadow it.
Ben Reinhardt
Ben Reinhardt is the founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab built on the ARPA model to unlock materials and manufacturing breakthroughs that have no natural home in startups, academia, or government. A space-robotics PhD who once built tractor beams at Cornell and taught machines to see at Magic Leap, he became one of the most-read writers on how DARPA actually works, then set out to build a privately funded version of it. He hosts the Idea Machines podcast, where he interviews people who design the systems that produce innovation.