“I grew up assuming going to space was easy,” Mickey Matthew told Payload. His family moved to Houston, TX, when he was nine, and in middle school a friend canceled weekend plans because a parent was going to space. With seven friends who had astronaut parents, going to space felt like something everyone was doing.
As he later found out, it wasn’t—and part of the reason is that nearly every spacecraft team rebuilds its software from scratch. As cofounder and COO of WarpWare, Matthew is hoping to give teams a head start with flight-ready software instead.
“”A five-person team with a good idea shouldn’t need three years and a nine-figure budget to get a vehicle talking to the ground,” he said.
Making the leap: Matthew studied aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University, interning at NASA Goddard before landing a job at Sierra Space when it had ~300 employees. As Sierra grew its workforce to 3,000, Matthew went from hands-on testing with astronauts to business development to deputy chief engineer, even presenting to investors.
While at Sierra, Matthew asked his friend Alex Reynolds—who led flight software integration at Sierra—how much existing code could be reused for a new vehicle. “The answer to that turned out to be zero,” he said.
The payload companies they talked to were stuck in the same loop. “It’s like having to reinvent Microsoft Word before you can write a document,” Matthew said.
So, in 2023, he and Reynolds co-founded WarpWare, whose tools cover digital twin testing, flight software and mission operations. The company works with Orbit Fab, Starlab, LEAP, and Argotec, among others, and was one of 15 companies—and one of two based in the US—picked for NATO DIANA’s resilient space operations cohort.
Pay it forward: Outside of work, Matthew mentors aerospace engineering and entrepreneurship students from Texas A&M and CU Boulder, and is deliberate about hiring from outside the traditional pipeline. “Knowledge is free, and if anyone ever has questions, I’m an open book,” he said.
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Muhammad Hunain, Melagen Labs
“That’s where I realized we’re stuck at a 1980s standard: still shielding spacecraft with aluminum, and rad-hardened electronics [were] too expensive to build at the scale this economy demands,” Hunain told Payload.
Dallas-based Balerion Space Ventures has surpassed its $200M target for its second fund, the firm announced Thursday. Fund II—which remains open—is more than five times the size of the firm’s debut fund, which came in at just under $40M.
Balerion had closed ~$90M as of May, according to Venture Capital Journal. Cofounder and General Partner Daniel Kleinmann chalked up the momentum since then to portfolio companies hitting milestones and raising up-rounds—which he said resonated with LPs.
The firm is also holding back capital for follow-on rounds. “These are really capital-intensive businesses,” Kleinmann told Payload. “Having the ability to reserve capital to continue supporting these businesses as they hit major technical, commercial, government milestones is really important to us.”
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