People
Notable people in the space industry
12 people tracked4 founders
Founders, engineers and authors — living and historical — connected to the companies and programs this directory tracks.
Founders & executives
Elon Musk
Founder & CEO · SpaceX
Founding SpaceX in 2002 and driving reusable orbital rockets from an untested idea to the dominant launch method in the industry
Jeff Bezos
Founder · Blue Origin
Founding Blue Origin in 2000, funded initially from his Amazon wealth, pursuing reusable suborbital and orbital launch vehicles
Peter Beck
Founder & CEO · Rocket Lab
Founding Rocket Lab in 2006 and building the Electron rocket into the most-flown small launch vehicle in the world
Gwynne Shotwell
President & COO · SpaceX
Running SpaceX day-to-day operations since 2008 and closing the commercial and government launch contracts that funded its growth
Engineers & scientists
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Theorist · Independent (Russian Empire / Soviet Union)
Deriving the rocket equation and proposing multi-stage rockets and space stations decades before either was built
Robert H. Goddard
Engineer & Physicist · Clark University
Building and launching the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926, the founding practical demonstration of modern rocketry
Hermann Oberth
Theorist & Engineer · Independent (Germany / Romania)
Publishing foundational rocketry theory in the 1920s and mentoring the German rocket engineers who later built the V-2
Wernher von Braun
Chief Architect, Saturn V · NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center
Leading development of the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany, then the Saturn V rocket that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon
Sergei Korolev
Chief Designer · Soviet space program
Leading the Soviet rocket program that launched Sputnik, the first satellite, and Vostok 1, the first crewed spaceflight
Katherine Johnson
Mathematician · NASA Langley Research Center
Hand-calculating the orbital trajectories for the first US crewed spaceflight and the Apollo 11 Moon landing
Authors & commentators
Chad Anderson
Founder & Managing Partner · Space Capital
Running Space Capital, an early venture fund dedicated to the commercial space industry, and publishing widely-cited market data on space startup investment
Rainer Zitelmann
Historian & Author · Independent
Writing "New Space Capitalism," an argument for entrepreneurial commercial space development, alongside a long career of books on wealth and capitalism