To many young space enthusiasts scrolling on TikTok, Camille Bergin is the face of the industry.
Her social media personality—@TheGalacticGal—features deep dives into the latest off-world science, as well as her career path as a female aerospace engineer. It has amassed nearly a million followers, but Bergin isn’t in it for the likes.
“We are doing so much good in this industry, but the public doesn’t know about it, and the public thinks that we are a waste of time or that we are an escapist industry,” Bergin told Payload. “It just became my personal mission to break down the stigmas.”
Brass tracks: While Bergin has been enamored with space since seeing Space Shuttle Endeavour take flight in 2001, her pathway to becoming the chief marketing officer at Star Catcher was anything but linear. In grade school, without any “women in STEM role models [to] turn to,” she focused on music, and became a nationally ranked trumpet player. Falling in love with the math behind the music, she attended the University of Tennessee, where she realized a career in space was possible.
“I walked on campus, and I saw all these women, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, OK, I can do this…There’s people here that look like me,” Bergin said.
At UT, she worked on everything from hypersonic components to jet engines. After graduating she joined Lockheed Martin, working on the Orion crew capsule.
Left brain, right brain: But Bergin was hungry for more. While at Lockheed, she created a new role that allowed her to merge her engineering and communications skills. From there, Bergin leapt to the startup world with a new mandate—to make sure that frontier technologies don’t die in the dark.
She has since worked at Orbit Fab, Vast, and now Star Catcher, where she is flexing both sides of her brain to get space industry’s message out—not just what engineers are building, but who the industry is and how the public can help.
“My goal is to build an entire generation that can ensure space’s story is always told to the extent it deserves,” Bergin 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.”
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