Benjamin Spencer, the lead engineer for Nova development at satellite manufacturing company Apex Space, can build satellites faster than you can.
“He has single-handedly elevated what it means to produce excellent engineering work here at Apex, and has set the standard for every program to come,” Nicolas Gutierrez, head of RF and comms at Apex, said about Spencer. “We definitely could not have done it without him.”
Baby steps: Spencer’s roles in the industry have run the gamut from lab work to operations to design, and building everything from spacecraft components, to satellites, to rockets.
He got his start working in a space physics lab at the University of Colorado while in school. After graduating, he made the jump to industry, working in operations at BlackSky.
“It was actually really interesting to go from the polar opposites: from traditional, well-established space, all the way to something that was a little more Wild West,” Spencer said.
While at BlackSky, Spencer made another switch—this time, from operations to design. He took a job at Tyvak Space Systems (now Terran Orbital) working in systems engineering. After Tyvak, he worked at Rocket Lab as a systems engineer.
“Operations was fun, and you have to learn how everything works. Because if you don’t, you don’t really know how to operate it. But going from that to design, that was my big thing, because I really would love to actually put all this knowledge at work and do the next big thing,” Spencer said.
“Getting in the weeds of small space, and learning a bunch, and making it happen definitely kept my curiosity there—and wanting to always come back to an environment in which I can have a wide set of opportunities.”
Career apex: After his stint at Rocket Lab, Spencer joined Apex in April 2024, just after the company launched its first satellite.. He’d been around the company since before it launched its first satellite, and joined the team in April 2024 just after that launch. Now, he leads a 50-person team developing Apex’s larger satellite bus, Nova.
“As a mentor, he fosters collaboration among younger engineers and encourages them to challenge traditional aerospace timelines,” Ian Cinnamon, CEO and cofounder of Apex, said about Spencer.
“By his late twenties, he is already transforming the space industry: democratizing access to orbit by delivering high‑reliability spacecraft on unprecedented timelines, and building the foundational hardware for proliferated LEO constellations.”
