Arpi Beshlikyan’s top priority is making a big impact. Right now, space is the vehicle allowing her to do that.
All aboard: Beshlikyan has always looked for jobs where she can make as big an impact as possible. At UCLA, she worked as a researcher in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology, and built software systems to help cancer researchers run bioinformatics projects. She later worked at Parallel, a company developing autonomous, electric trains.
“Each step seems really disjointed from the outside, but for me, it’s about the highest impact I can have at any given point in my career,” Beshlikyan told Payload. “I’m really attracted to opportunities where I get to contribute to something that is at the basis of society.”
Ground control: As an early hire at Northwood, Beshlikyan has played a central role building the company’s cloud software to make ground stations more accessible to satellites.
Historically, managing connections from satellites in orbit to ground stations on Earth has been a manual process. By helping Northwood build a more efficient, software-defined system, Beshlikyan is making space more accessible to people—like her—who weren’t born with space on their mind.
Her work is focused on turning ground stations from a constraint to the space industry’s growth, to a catalyzing piece of the value chain.
Although she’s surrounded by lifelong space enthusiasts at Northwood, Beshlikyan says a fresh set of eyes has helped the company build systems for the next-generation of spacecraft. Without preconceived notions of how things have always been done, she’s assisted with building a ground network that’s unlike any of the legacy systems that came before it.
“There’s no reason [why] it can’t be as easy to connect to a satellite as it is to connect your cell phone to a cell tower…It’s just work that needs to get done,” Beshlikyan said.
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.”
Keep reading