Will is CEO and Co-Founder of Varda Space Industries, a microgravity-enabled life sciences company whose reentry capsules leverage the unique environment of microgravity in low-Earth orbit. Prior to Varda, Will co-founded a small venture fund called Also Capital and served as Director of Global Equities Technology at Bank of America. He was the lead avionics engineer at SpaceX and flew Dragon on eight missions to the International Space Station. Will holds a B.S. in Applied Physics from Cornell and a master's in Systems Engineering. He was raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his hobbies include flying and maintaining his Cozy MK4 aircraft.

Ian Cinnamon is the CEO and Co-Founder of Apex, a high-rate configurable satellite bus platform manufacturer named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025. Backed by over $500 million from the world’s best investors, Apex’s first satellite bus set a world record as the fastest cleansheet design to production spacecraft operating in space. Focused on meeting the needs of the rapidly expanding space industry and advancing critical national security missions like Golden Dome, Apex provides scalable platforms to both the commercial and government sectors. Apex's Los Angeles production facility can deliver satellite buses to customers in weeks rather than the industry standard of months or years, with the capacity to produce over 200 buses per year at full scale. Prior to his work with Apex, Ian founded Synapse, a company specializing in artificial intelligence for security and defense. Ian led the company through acquisition by Palantir. Earlier in his career, Ian co-founded Superlabs, which was sold to Zynga, where he served as Director of Product after the acquisition. Ian is a Forbes "30 Under 30" honoree and an alumnus of Y Combinator. He received his B.S. from MIT and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Dan Roelker is co-founder and CEO of Observable Space, a venture-backed space technology company with over 1,000 enterprise and government customers worldwide. Observable Space is headquartered in Los Angeles with a 57-acre advanced manufacturing campus in Michigan. It is the world’s largest vertically integrated hardware and software company for on-planet and in-space observation and laser communication systems.

Dan spent more than four years as VP of Software Engineering at SpaceX, where he led a team of 350 engineers who built the software for the company’s Falcon rockets, Dragon spacecraft, Starship platform, and Starlink satellite network. During Dan’s time at SpaceX, he led the software engineering team from the inaugural landing of the Falcon 9 rocket first stage through the launch of the first Starship and Starlink prototypes.

Before joining SpaceX, Dan assembled and led a team of software engineers at Riot Games, which developed a new League of Legends client supporting over 100 million players worldwide. Dan started his career in cybersecurity as a founding developer at Sourcefire (later acquired by Cisco for $2.7B), where he wrote over half of the code for the open-source project Snort, an intrusion prevention system, and was granted six patents. From there, Dan was recruited by DARPA to lead cyber warfare research as one of its youngest program managers where he created a $350 million portfolio of advanced offensive computer security technologies. His flagship program, PlanX, was adopted as a formal program of record in the Department of Defense and Cyber Command. Dan was the VP of Engineering at OpenSea during its meteoric rise in the crypto wave of 2021. He also founded two hacker groups that were acquired by BAE Systems and Raytheon, and was a member of the winning hacker team at Defcon 17 CTF.

In addition to leading Observable Space, Dan is currently a chief technology adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and an adviser at multiple venture capital firms and tech startups.

Eric Romo is President and Chief Operating Officer of Impulse Space, the in-space mobility company founded by Tom Mueller. Beginning his career as one of the first propulsion engineering hires at SpaceX, he subsequently founded companies in the solar energy and virtual reality industries and spent four years as a Director at Facebook Reality Labs. Eric has a master's degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA, both from Stanford University.