Jacob Rodriguez didn’t dream of a career in space, growing up in a low-income California neighborhood. Now, the CEO of Oligo Space is getting ready to send his first spacecraft to orbit.
Look up: Rodriguez, who spent time as a young kid helping his grandfather with construction projects and taking care of his siblings, said everything changed for him in elementary school. He saw the Space Shuttle Endeavour fly over Los Angeles aboard the back of an airline in 2012—its final flight before becoming a museum exhibit at the California Science Center.
“At that moment, I knew there were futures beyond anything I’d imagined,” he said.
After earning a full scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study aerospace engineering, Rodriguez scored an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Oligo is born: In 2024, Rodriguez founded Oligo to streamline spacecraft design, cut manufacturing timelines, and make space accessible to those that don’t have a background in sending payloads to orbit.
“Oligo was founded as a unity of my passions for space hardware, autonomy, machine learning, and robotics into a single mission: enabling any nation to design, build, and operate its own spacecraft through automation,” he said.
What’s next: The company is expecting to launch its first spacecraft—Chimera-1—in 2026 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-15 mission, Rodriguez said.
