Victoria Woodburn

“As a political-science major, I knew I wasn’t going to design rockets or build satellites,” she said. “But I understood I could contribute by shaping the policies that enable those missions.”

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.

Hayley Blyth’s path into space started with a question about war: how do the rules of armed conflict apply in orbit?

“I grew up assuming going to space was easy,” Mickey Matthew told Payload. With seven friends who had astronaut parents, going to space felt like something everyone was doing.

When a former colleague shared that his company was working to counter a recently-launched Russian military sat, Pasha Kravtsov wanted in.

Growing up, Tyler Bernstein’s favorite NASA missions—from Mars rovers to Voyager’s interstellar journey—all had one thing in common: They all ran on nuclear batteries.

Now at In-Q-Tel, Chalphin is tackling one of the most challenging moves yet—moving startup technology into the hands of the government.

His introduction to space started with a childhood-science-fair hoverboard. He emailed experts for the math behind it until Robert Boyd—who was working on hybrid airships at Skunk Works—wrote back.

“Many of the geopolitical issues that we see in the nuclear weapons space are replicated when it comes to space security issues,” he said.