While he’s helping the government figure out how to keep the current generation of astronauts safe and sound, Benjamin Kron is also drumming up excitement among the next generation of space fans.
The 26-year-old works at SAIC as a senior program analyst, but he’s detailed to the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space, where he helps out with rulemaking on everything from launch to human spaceflight and staffs the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC).
Beames me up: After studying international relations and Chinese at George Washington University, Kron fell into the space industry thanks to a friend’s introduction to Chuck Beames, the former Pentagon space intelligence official turned investor and chairman of York Space Systems.
That’s how Kron wound up as employee number 20 at York in 2020, working on its biz dev team and writing contract proposals. “I was the guy going between the engineers and then writing it to make it digestible for the average person, but it was a crazy learning curve,” he told Payload.
Dream weaver: After helping York win its $94M SDA contract to build the agency’s first generation of communications spacecraft, he even played a small role in building them. On a visit to York’s Denver office, he got pulled into a clean room to do some wire harness wrapping.
“I got to touch something that went to space,” he said. “And I got to do the hand work that I used to do as a kid in tennis shops on a multi-million dollar satellite.”
Pay it forward: Kron is also a board member at the Washington Space Business Roundtable, where he leads the organization’s annual charity auction. Last year’s fundraising went in part to provide eclipse-viewing glasses for school children in DC, Maryland, and Virginia to witness April’s total solar eclipse.
“Everybody loves space, whether a small kid in school here, or the Air Force generals we deal with,” Kron said.
