Growing up, Khushi Shah thought working in space meant a career path in the engineering industry.
However, Shah was eventually drawn to more “creative parts” of the industry and is now creating art that’s touched down on the lunar surface.
First steps: Shah joined the Space Generation Advisory Council in India—and got a taste of leadership as their Asia-Pacific communications manager. “That opened a lot of doors for me…making people understand why space is really important in at least 10 different countries.”
That rapidly brought Shah lunarside. Shah spoke to the founder of Space Pride, who in turn referred Shah to the Interstellar Foundation, which was building the ASPIRE One Record—a time capsule of human history and culture inspired by the Voyager Golden Record—for a Moon landing.
Touch down; Working with fellow artist Rania Djojosugito, the resulting art portrayed a colorful black hole surrounded by rainbows. The piece—which is part of the 1GB of content on the project—actually made it to the Moon twice, aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2. “I kind of built my whole life living up to that dream, or trying to achieve that impossible goal,” Shah said, recalling wanting to touch the Moon as a child.
What’s next: More recently, Shah moved to New York City and successfully completed a design program at the Parsons School of Design, while also working there as a research assistant. Shah is also working with Orbiventure, as a contract service designer looking at how environmental and satellite data is used for fisheries.
“The work spans community research, co-design facilitation, and adoption testing, starting with fisheries and expanding into agriculture and environmental justice. Looking ahead, I want to work with organizations and agencies building Earth-observation tools, helping them design for adoption instead of just launch. And I want to work with the communities and institutional bodies helping them actually put it to work,” Shah said.
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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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