For most of his career, Louis Reitmann studied weapons the public almost never sees. Nuclear facilities are “famously not very public,” he told Payload, and radioactive material isn’t exactly something you’d want to get close to. To see space, on the other hand, he just has to look at the Austrian sky.
Reitmann is the first space expert at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (VCDNP)—a think tank in Vienna, Austria—where he has pulled in roughly $1.4M to support UN talks on preventing an arms race in space.
Chain reaction: Nuclear policy fascinated Reitmann as an undergraduate. “Once you understood the scale and the potential consequences of nuclear conflict, it just was impossible to not care about it anymore,” he said. After volunteering with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in Chicago, IL and working for the EU’s disarmament envoy in Brussels, Belgium, he joined the VCDNP.
According to Reitmann, space came “by accident.” In spring 2025, a UK Foreign Office funding call listed space security as a priority, and Reitmann—who had no background in the field—pitched a project anyway and won a $300,000 grant. What followed was “an extremely steep learning curve,” but much of his nuclear playbook transferred.
“Many of the geopolitical issues that we see in the nuclear weapons space are replicated when it comes to space security issues,” he said.
Switchbacks: Instead of formal meetings among diplomats, Reitmann convenes small groups from space commands, agencies, academia, and industry, then carries their proposals to delegations in Geneva, Switzerland, and New York, NY. His Space Norms Atlas—launched this year—is now a resource UN delegations use to draft proposals.
Getting international delegations to agree on rules can be an uphill battle, but Reitmann enjoys the climb. In his limited free time, he hikes the easternmost Alps near Vienna, where the summit can look impossible from the bottom.
“Turning around and not finishing the hike…is just not an option,” he said. “It’s really worth the climb to be at the top.”
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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