SpaceX’s ($SPCX) impact on the space industry is much broader than the company’s own achievements.
As an organization that’s employed thousands of engineers in its 24-year history, SpaceX has acted as both a breeding ground for high-level talent, and as a launch pad for new ideas.
Insights from Crustdata, gathered from publicly available sources and shared with Payload, reveal the true extent of SpaceX’s stamp on the wider market.
Crustdata found that ~1,330 SpaceX alumni have founded new ventures after leaving the company. Collectively, these founders have raised $9.2B to date.
The longtail: Not all of these founders remained in the space industry—with some going on to found companies in AI, aviation, defense, and biotech—but those who did started some of the biggest names in the industry, including:
- Firefly Aerospace;
- Relativity Space;
- Apex;
- Stoke Space;
- K2 Space;
- Impulse Space;
- Xona Space Systems.
SpaceX doesn’t just churn out new founders, though. It also created a fertile hunting ground from which other space companies poach. In this category, Blue Origin is by far the largest recipient of SpaceX-trained employees, as Crustdata found that over 300 current Blue workers spent some time at SpaceX.
This talent stream flows both ways, however, and Crustdata also found that ~130 current SpaceX employees previously worked for the Bezos-backed launcher.
Alma matters: Crustdata also shared information about where SpaceX tends to hire from, and new employees seemed to degrees from similar universities. Of the 8,211 current US-based SpaceX employees tracked by Crustdata:
- 110 graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology;
- 108 from University of Michigan;
- 92 from Purdue University;
- 91 from University of Texas at Austin;
- 85 from University of Southern California.
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Firefly Aerospace ($FLY) announced yesterday that it acquired Space-ng, which is an AI-powered vision navigation and autonomous guidance systems provider.
While financial details have not been disclosed, Space-ng will be fully integrated into Firefly and Space-ng Cofounder and CEO Ethan Rublee will oversee Firefly’s spacecraft software suite as its newly established chief engineer of software.
“There’s a lot of synergies here,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim told Payload. “Not only can Space-ng’s capabilities help us with landing on the Moon, they can help us with all the other missions that need that kind of real-time navigation and hazard avoidance.”
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