“It’s good to get the big picture of the satellite, both pre-launch and post-launch as well,” Shetti told Payload. “It definitely fixed the jigsaw puzzle.”

“Helping our species become interplanetary seems like the best thing you can do with your life,” Charrier told Payload. “Every step of my career…kind of zigzags, but keeps going towards that.”

In 2018, Australia passed its first regulatory framework for civil space activities. Lawson was among the first lawyers to hack his way through the new legalese—and make it out unscathed, on the other side.

Annika Rollock knew she wanted to work in the space industry the first time she saw Apollo 13—not as one of the astronauts flying the mission, but as one of the engineers keeping the spacecraft’s team alive.

“He has single-handedly elevated what it means to produce excellent engineering work here at Apex, and has set the standard for every program to come,” Nicolas Gutierrez, head of RF and comms at Apex, said about Spencer. “We definitely could not have done it without him.”

Space tech does a lot of good for people down here on Earth. For Sairaksha Kesarla, an engineering program manager at Planet Labs ($PL), that’s the whole point.

Alex Reynolds is the founder and CEO of ATTX, a two-year-old startup building the software stack for clients in the space industry. The idea: create software that can work for clients across the space ecosystem, and eliminate the need for companies to build all their own stuff.

fter his time at SpaceX, Sinclair made the leap to Turion. Sinclair moved across the country to join the company when it was a small startup of seven people (though he’s now one of 140+). 

“When the FAA released theirs on launch vehicle debris mitigation…I decided to write one just for fun,” she told Payload.

“At that moment, I knew there were futures beyond anything I’d imagined,” he said.

From testing astronaut medicines on the ISS to studying exoplanets, the Lithuanian-born researcher is turning once-abstract space dreams into practical steps for exploring beyond LEO.

As the leader of the electrical engineering team at Muon Space, Garett Goodale’s work boils down to one question: How do you build systems flexible enough for every customer, which can be built fast and cheap enough to be profitable?