Molly MacEachen wants to help companies comply with space-sustainability frameworks, but that market doesn’t exist today—so she’s building it herself.
MacEachen established Mac’s Impact Consulting in 2025 after working at Deloitte, where siloed focus areas meant she couldn’t work on her interests in space and DEI. Most of her clients are outside of the space industry—but she’s looking to change that.
“It’s hard to get space companies to move the needle on space sustainability,” she told Payload. “Everyone wants to talk about it, but they don’t want to pay to do it.”
Build it and they will come: Mac’s Impact Consulting includes four part-time researchers creating a “one-stop shop” for space-sustainability guidelines and frameworks. The goal is to give companies one database to compare findings in the Outer Space Treaty, the UN’s space sustainability guidelines, and documents developed by think tanks or industry.
“It’s almost like a 10-year plan for me,” she said. “There’s not a framework I can say, ‘Hey, client at a space company, you need me to align with this,’ because it doesn’t exist. But in 10 years, if our work sets out a framework, there will be something to align them with. So it’s a little bit of developing what eventually we’ll be able to help compliance with.”
Trash day: Space debris is what lured MacEachen into the space industry to begin with.
“Learning that sustainability is not just a problem on Earth was such an eye-opener for me,” she said.
While finishing her undergrad, MacEachene worked as an independent consultant with the United Nations Global Compact, where she helped build the reporting standards and tools to help companies measure their progress against UN sustainability goals.
Space pride: MacEachen has also served on the board of Space Pride since 2024. She was inspired to join when a friend, after presenting at a space conference, was told that sharing their pronouns at the start of the presentation was “distracting,” MacEachen said.
The group has become especially important as the space community gathers in places that aren’t friendly to the LGBTQ+ community, including the IAC in Turkey.
“We’ve had to take all of the LGBTQIA language out of our brochures,” she said. We’re really an organization trying to solve this, but we can’t solve it at the level of Turkey’s government.”
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.”
Keep reading