Clay Ito’s goal is to help space companies focus on the things that only they can do.
Ito, a staff software engineer at OpenC3, joined as Employee No. 5 to help space companies put their resources into payloads or space vehicles by standardizing software across the industry. OpenC3’s open-source software, COSMOS, enables space companies to work on everything from testing to operating space missions.
“We would prefer people to not have to re-invent the wheel,” Ito told Payload. “We find that our biggest competitor is going to be ambitious engineers at their company that are building their own solution.”
“We just want people to get started so they can focus on the mission, and not all the tinkering,” he added.
Get hooked: Ito had an exciting entrance into the space industry. He joined Viasat as an intern in 2017, and in his first week got to witness the ViaSat-2 satellite launch aboard an Arianespace Ariane 5.
“Working in aerospace, you have these expectations of what it’s going to be like, versus the reality,” he said. “But Week 1 at an internship where there’s a rocket launch, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, this is very much happening. This is a very cool thing.’”
Ito went on to work at what is now called Vantor, building the software that helped get imagery into the hands of customers.
Breakneck: The software industry is changing rapidly—but Ito sees that as a positive rather than a setback.
“The pace and rate of change, of course it can be scary because there’s so much happening, and so much you have to do,” he said. “But we are at this moment in time where I have all these ideas of things I want to make, and it can go from a prototype to something that’s merged and ready to go in a matter of hours. For me, it’s the most exciting time to be an engineer.”
James Shin, K2 Space
“As I begin to understand how much [impact]…things like cellular telecommunications, imaging, climate [research]…have globally—once I started to understand that, I was like, ‘Okay, this is definitely the industry that I want to work in,’” Shin told Payload.
Robert Ihnatisin, Orbital Matter
As an expert in 3D printing for terrestrial applications, Robert Ihnatisin was surprised by how slow the in-orbit manufacturing industry was progressing. So, naturally, he started a company to solve the problem himself.
Patrick Miga, Advanced Space
In first grade, Patrick Miga saw a photo of Neptune (snapped by the Voyager 2 spacecraft).. Ever since then, his life has been directed toward space.
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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