Max Bhatti’s recipe for success in the space industry is one part luck, and nine parts hustle.
As a high-school student “desperate for an internship,” he sent out hundreds of emails to labs around the country hoping to work on complex physics and aerospace problems. As luck would have it, MIT’s AeroAstro lab was temporarily operating out of a researcher’s garage due to COVID, just down the street from Bhatti in LA. The rest is history.
Hex appeal: While at MIT’s AeroAstro lab, Bhatti helped develop the university’s first custom satellite bus, while managing a schedule that included high-school homework and NASA meetings. At MIT, he was also able to crack a problem—programming raw hex bytes into RF chips—that had stumped the group’s postdoc researchers.
In college, Bhatti led one of the UCLA rocket team’s propulsion departments, while also working on constellation design as an Aerospace Corporation intern. Like any good space founder, Bhatti also has a SpaceX internship—where he worked on Starship—under his belt.
And the multitasking doesn’t end there. Bhatti was preparing a PhD application in combustion technology, when a former CEO of Y Combinator called and implored him to join the incubator. That’s when Basalt Space was born.
Rock solid: At 23 years old, Bhatti is already on his third startup with Basalt. He founded the company to sell constellations-as-a-service, where customers can rent out Basalt sats on a monthly or yearly basis.
Basalt is building buses and optical payloads in-house, and plans to fly satellites with a mix of sensors and capabilities, so customers can access space-based data without the headache of building or financing the purchase of expensive hardware themselves. The company has raised ~$4.9M at a $50M valuation, and has hired a 10-person team including alumni from NRO, Lockheed, and SpaceX.
Basalt is planning to launch its next demo sat by the end of 2027, when Bhatti’s life-long dream will come to fruition.
“My No. 1 force in life is to build things that fly to space,” Bhatti 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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