SpaceX Alumni Have Collectively Formed More Than 100 New Startups

Innovation is foundational at SpaceX, the California-based company founded by Elon Musk in 2002. Not only has the company written a veritable laundry list of firsts, bests and mosts, it has also served as a cradle for former employees to start their own high-tech firms. Several SpaceX alumni startups are prospering, while others are still developing products and preparing to enter the marketplace.

Since its founding, SpaceX is the first privately held company to develop a liquid-propellant rocket that has reached orbit, the first private company to launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft, the first non-governmental agency to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, and the first to send astronauts to the International Space Station. They are the first company to send private astronauts to orbit without the ISS being a destination, the first organization of any type to achieve a vertical propulsive landing of an orbital rocket booster, and the first to reuse such a booster. The company’s Falcon 9 rockets have landed and reflown over 200 times. They also hold the record for launching the most powerful rocket in human history, the Starship Heavy, which is still being developed in Texas.

Those are their headline innovations, with hundreds more large and small escaping mention. One of those may be providing a fertile training ground for a cadre of entrepreneurs and engineers who have left the company and started their own space-related startups.

Space-Related Firms

SpaceX alumnus Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space with Blue Origin alumnus Tim Ellis in 2015 after they left their respective companies. Relativity has built and flown a test vehicle from Cape Canaveral, Terran-1, and is developing a much larger rocket, Terran-R. It’s estimated that they employ over 900 employees at the company’s facilities.

In 2017, SpaceX alumnus Harry O’Hanley founded ABL Systems, a startup company that employs 325+ and is now preparing for its second orbital flight.

Former SpaceX Texas Test Site Director Dr. Thomas Markusic founded Firefly Aerospace, a Cedar Park, Texas firm with over 500 employees. Firefly has successfully orbited payloads for the Department of Defense and has been contracted by aerospace giant Northrup Grumman to build its Antares rocket’s first stage.

Non-Space Related Firms

Synthego, founded by SpaceX former digital design engineer Paul Dabrowski and former SpaceX Head of Sofware Development Michael Dabrowski, focuses on design software for CRISPR research in genetics.

Michael Smayda co-founded Hermeus, a Doraville, Georgia startup company working on creating hypersonic passenger aircraft. The company has been awarded a contract by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to mature hypersonic aircraft subsystem and mission system technologies using its Quarterhorse prototype. It is also developing an engine for future aircraft, the Chimera.

Parallel Systems, a startup founded by SpaceX alumni Matt Soule and John Howard, works on autonomous freight rail vehicles that move freight more responsively, with a zero-carbon footprint and on existing rail infrastructure. The company has successfully demonstrated their technologies.

Arc Boat Company manufactures electric pleasure boats, and was founded by former Falcon 9 First Stage and Second Stage Lead Engineer Ryan Cook.

And that’s just a partial list. All in all, there are over 100 technology companies founded by SpaceX alumni, making the 21-year-old firm a veritable cradle of startups created by its employees. Those startups have collectively raised some $4.5 Billion in capital and employed over 4,600 people over the various enterprises.