Space Kinetic

Space Kinetic is a venture-backed aerospace startup founded in 2022 that develops proprietary technology to enable abundant and affordable manoeuvrability in space for national security missions. The company works across space systems, spacecraft manoeuvrability, orbital operations and aerospace engineering, with a particular interest in alternatives to the traditional rocket equation. Its engineering activity spans low Earth orbit and beyond, serving the space, defence and national security verticals.

Its principal product is the Whirlwind platform, described by the company as "a new operating system for space". Whirlwind is built around an innovative "one-to-many" architecture, which Space Kinetic says brings abundant manoeuvrability and favourable marginal costs to the space domain. The company's technical work is directed at problems in space operations that, in its own account, nobody has thought through before.

Space Kinetic was founded by Ryan Sullivan and Scott Ziegler, former graduate students at UC Berkeley, and grew out of a research project. The team describes itself as mission-oriented and intellectually curious, and recruits for engineers interested in hard technical problems at the cutting edge of the field. The company maintains a presence in New Mexico and in El Segundo, California, in the United States.