CEO @Astranis. Founder, aerospace engineer. Building real things to solve some of the world’s hardest problems
San Francisco, CA
Joined July 2008
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Incredible being hosted by NASA and @NASAAdmin at KSC for the UP Summit.
Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the future of space.
Next looking forward to MAX POWER 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Thank you to the many veterans who call Astranis home.
Your service means the world to us 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Thank you to all who have served. 🇺🇸
This Veterans Day, we’re sharing a moment from Episode 1 of the Astranis Podcast. Our own Will Harden (Technical Sergeant, U.S. Air Force, 2004-2019) and Isaiah Rivers (Senior Master Sergeant, U.S. Air Force, 1986-2006) sit down with Jeffrey Spinnanger (Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Air Force; Active 1994-2005, Reserve 2005-2020) to reflect on the sacrifice, commitment, and sense of duty that define a life of service, and how that mission continues long after the uniform.
Today and every day, we honor the men and women whose courage and dedication have kept our nation safe.
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Excited to announce that @NASA has selected Astranis for the first phase of NEXUS, a new program to replace the aging GEO satellites that provide mission-critical comms links for some of NASA's most important space assets.
That includes the International Space Station, Artemis, the Hubble Telescope, and NASA's Earth science fleet.
NEXUS will soon require an entire constellation of highly capable spacecraft, as the existing fleet of large GEO relay satellites reaches end of life and are retired.
If you didn't know NASA maintains its own fleet of massive GEO communications satellites I wouldn't blame you-- it's one of those pieces of high orbit infrastructure that has been quietly supporting everything NASA does for decades, but very much behind the scenes.
These satellites are necessary because important space assets like the International Space Station are in LEO, and don't pass over ground stations nearly as often as their operators would like. So the ISS and these other important NASA assets end up relaying most of their data through a constellation of large, expensive GEO satellites called the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites, or TDRS, keeping them connected 24/7.
NASA awarded Astranis a contract with a maximum potential value of $264.3 million, in a firm-fixed-price contract that gives NASA the option to provide additional funding up to the award limit to advance from initial concept development and risk reduction to an in-orbit flight demonstration.
And that's just the beginning. We estimate NASA deployed the existing TDRS constellation at a cost of $13 billion-$15 billion in today's dollars. By working with a company like Astranis, they can replace that capability at a fraction of the cost, freeing up crucial resources for NASA's highest priority future missions, returning astronauts to the Moon and building the Moon Base.
Special thanks to our partners at NASA for their hard work on this program and for making this happen in record time. We're super excited about this mission and providing a capability that NASA, and our nation, badly needs.
Onward to the next phase. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
Great to grab lunch with Space Force Chief @SpaceForceCSO General Schiess.
Space Force’s budget increase to $59B is in very good hands. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
John Gedmark retweeted
Finding an RCE in the Linux TCP stack is some 1990's shit. Wow.
Spelunking through kernel code just stopped being worth the effort with all the other attack vectors up the stack. But with AI, it's basically free.
So we're dredging up monsters lurking in the deep.
There it is. China will attempt a human landing on the lunar surface sometime in 2029.
The space race is on my friends. I have full confidence the United States we can get there first under @NASAAdmin 's leadership.
But there is no time to waste.
Leaked slide confirms the four-mission progression toward China’s crewed lunar landing:
🚀2027: Maiden flight of Long March 10A carrying Mengzhou CSS cargo resupply mission, to validate the new human-rated vehicle and Mengzhou’s orbital operations in LEO.
🚀2028: First flight of the heavier CZ-10 with an uncrewed Lanyue lander performing a lunar descent and ascent test, exercising the lander’s propulsion and guidance.
🚀🚀2029: Dual CZ-10 launches of Mengzhou and Lanyue for a full-scale lunar-orbit rehearsal, demonstrating rendezvous, docking, and integrated operations.
🚀🚀Before the end of 2030: Dual CZ-10 crewed lunar landing mission.
Thanks to our long time investors at @a16z for putting this out there. Couldn't agree more-- production is deterrence means scaled manufacturing is what ultimately matters.
That's why we are proud to be partnering with the US Export Import bank on a major new line of financing. To massively scale our satellite production here in America.
The 2026 American Dynamism 50 is here: our annual list of 50 companies, from within the a16z portfolio and beyond, building for America's future.
This year's theme is Production is Deterrence. "America's ability to prevent conflict depends on what it can build, how fast it can deliver, and how long it can keep going."
A new generation of defense companies is moving from prototypes to full-scale production, and the industrial base has to keep pace. This year's list is organized around three pillars:
1. Systems: the drones, ships, missiles, aircraft, and spacecraft that deter conflict.
2. Factories: the plants, tools, and software that build them.
3. Inputs: the materials and power they're made of and run on.
Get all three right, and the impact reaches well beyond defense, to skilled jobs, revitalized communities, and the supply chains behind energy, housing, and everyday goods.
Meet all 50: a16z.news/p/ad-50-2026-produ…
In this cyber threat environment we're 100% going to see standalone, air-gapped networks using dedicated satellite assets.
If you're serious about shrinking the attack surface, that's the way to do it.
Astranis CEO @Gedmark on why AI-driven cyberattacks will push a chunk of government/enterprise activity off the public internet and onto siloed satellite networks.
“Where that ultimately leads, I think, is a larger desire to take entire pieces of infrastructure off the internet completely, and have countries and enterprises have more siloed networks: completely standalone networks, air-gapped from the public internet.”
With @itsmoislam at the @NYSE
Thanks @payloadspace for having me on live from @NYSE.
Great to talk the future of high orbits with sovereign satellites, cybersecurity, and Space Force.
Today we're excited to announce we have upgraded our 4th launch with our partners at @SpaceX to a dedicated mission, launching in 2028.
Given increased customer demand --in particular from the sovereign and air-gapped network verticals-- we decided to increase the number of satellites we're launching to 6. This is the entire production run of our spacecraft Block 4.
Sovereign satellites, and specifically sovereign satellites in geosynchronous orbit, allow a country or enterprise to have their own dedicated comms satellite with a purpose built network deployed around it.
In this new world of cyber threats and super-intelligent agents in the hands of malicious actors, we're seeing more and more the desire to pull infrastructure off the public internet entirely with dedicated networks. It's the most effective way to shrink the attack surface. And it's where the world is headed.
As a result we've seen huge increase in demand for satellites that our customers can control and lock-down from a cybersecurity perspective. Something uniquely possible on a nation-state scale with a geosynchronous satellite.
We are pumped about this launch. And the best part? We’re going straight to 22,000 miles up, with a direct-inject to GEO using an Impulse Helios upper stage.
We are now seeing an insane amount of commercial and US government demand, and we’re only just getting started.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the internet-connected device fad. Want to have them talk via local network to an opensource model on a Mac mini? ok sure.
But a public internet connected TV, washer, dryer, oven, toaster? Uh... no. Time to put an end that nonsense.
WTF, $3000 Samsung TV has an always-on mic, automatic content recognition, geo tracking, network mapping, and ships your data to Samsung + 400 partners.
Bro Rooted a brand-new 2025 Samsung TV after noticing absurdly targeted ads.
Firmware was locked down, so zero-days it was.
Got a root shell.
then found: always-on voice service, ACR, geo, full telemetry pipeline, and four separate DRM systems.
This isn’t a bug, It’s the product bro.
I do think this is the direction we’re headed— the world retrenching into smaller, heavily guarded or fully air-gapped local networks.
Not clear what the alternatives are if/when the public internet is overrun with cyberattacking super agents.
The cyber incidents of the last 48 hours have been pretty mind blowing. I’ve been trying to piece together the “why now” question, and I think what we’re seeing is the first of a new kind of super-agent driven vulnerability cascade-- first one vulnerability is found by a malicious actor, then other bad actors pop up to try and take advantage of it before companies patch their systems.
But because each bad actor is using swarms of thousands of super-agents, those agents are not only exploiting the existing vulnerability, but finding new zero days as well, all in a matter of hours. And the cycle repeats. As of the writing of this post there have been vulnerabilities found across at least half-dozen independent systems including LiteLLM, PHP, eMudhra Certificates, NGINX, Bind 9, and NodeJS. The list continues to grow hour by hour.
Basically everything connected to the internet is at risk. Not just company websites and the usual databases of sensitive personal information, but all our critical infrastructure-- banks, power grids, pipelines, government agencies, all of it.
The good news is that cybersecurity and ops teams had a chance to see this coming. This is why from when Mythos first dropped and had our first warning, these teams have been hard at work shoring up systems across the board.
This is also why at Astranis we’ve seen a massive uptick in demand for truly air-gapped, sovereign networks, deployed via dedicated satellite to span an entire country or connect a large enterprise.
It is in fact possible to take an entire category of critical infrastructure off the internet entirely. With a fully self-contained network where all the endpoints are off grid. This is not a new concept-- anyone could do this for your home today with equipment you can buy from Best Buy. But to stand up such a network covering a large geographic area or an entire country, without touching the existing fiber or other network infrastructure, you can only do that with a dedicated satellite. And specifically a satellite in a special orbit called geosynchronous orbit.
Over the past year we’ve begun working with some of our customers on what it will take to implement truly air-gapped, standalone networks in support of mission critical use cases like core government functions, emergency response, defense, core infrastructure, or all of the above.
That might sound extreme, but that is the kind of measure we expect will be required to shrink the attack surface of some of the world’s most critical infra. That’s just the position we are now in. It's a brave new world.
John Gedmark retweeted
Since your profile indicates you are a former NASA, I thought I would flag a few points:
1. I personally pay for all costs associated with the fleet of F-5 aircraft, be that airshows, NFL flyovers, or NASA workforce incentive flights. The rest of the NASA fleet, including F-15s, F/A-18s, and T-38s, requires currency flights to maintain pilot proficiency. Would you prefer they do that over the desert where no one can see them?
2. Obviously, the first A in NASA is Aeronautics, and throughout our history we have taken NASA X-planes to airshows. In fact, a lot of my strategy at NASA draws upon our proud history. We took the X-31 all the way to the Paris Air Show in 1995, the SR-71 was featured at the Edwards Air Show and Oshkosh in 1997, and the X-29 flew at the Dayton and Oshkosh airshows in 1990. It is part of our history, and do you know why? Because inspiring the next generation of engineers, scientists, researchers, pilots, and astronauts is part of what we do. It always has been.
3. It is also our nation’s 250th birthday and the year we returned NASA astronauts to the lunar environment. We are returning to the Moon, building a Moon base, and this is a great time to get out, engage with the public, and tell the NASA story.
xitter.twitterapi.xyz/NASAAdmin/status/21072…
Somewhere on that beach is a future pilot, engineer or astronaut. That’s why we fly.
An incredible weekend over Huntington Beach with our @NASA team at @PacificAirshow. America has big missions ahead, and we’re going to need the next generation ready to take them on.
