Not many people can turn a childhood dream of being a “space cowgirl” into a career, but Ashling Sugarman is getting close. She’s just traded a lasso for law books.
After studying international business as an undergrad at Pepperdine University, Sugarman spent three years at an intellectual property firm, where it finally clicked. “I realized, oh my goodness, you could take science and law and put it together, and this is so cool,” she told Payload.
Saddle up: Sugarman returned to Pepperdine for law school already set on space. Her first-year summer at the Space Court Foundation (SCF) convinced her she didn’t have to follow the big-law track—she could chart her own path. That path ran straight to the FCC Space Bureau, where she was the Front Office’s first intern during the bureau’s Part 100 licensing overhaul.
“I was constantly in awe every single day,” Sugarman said. “They would find just such creative ways to handle a certain issue.”
Rules of the range: Sugarman brings that same creativity to her research. In SCF’s Student Space Law Journal, she drew on aviation and maritime traffic rules to argue that the seven factors in the EU’s proposed Space Act—for deciding which satellite operator must move—don’t make sense in their current order, and suggested a new one.
At the 2026 International Space Development Conference, she presented a quantified framework that lets operators calculate how important a right-of-way maneuver is to them. “You can kind of say, ‘OK, this is my value. What’s yours?’ Whoever is the lower one, you have to maneuver,” she said.
New frontiers: At this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Antalya, Turkey, Sugarman presented on who should govern a lunar-time standard—and how to get rivals like the US and China to agree on one.
Back home, she’s finishing her final year at Pepperdine while working remotely as a legal extern with Blue Origin’s FL-based legal enterprise team. She hasn’t fully hung up the lasso, though—she still rides horses at a ranch 10 minutes from campus.
Long term, Sugarman wants to start her own space business, but first she wants to learn the industry from the inside. “I just want to really see how the industry breathes, and then I can understand where I can kind of fit into the puzzle,” she said.
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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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