MISSION UPDATES
Alex Coultrup
Director of Business & Policy
Starfish Space
Alex Coultrup (she/her) is Director of Business and Policy at Starfish Space, a satellite-servicing company building toward the future of affordable, accessible satellite servicing. She earned her M.S. from Florida Institute of Technology, where she focused on Space Policy and Human-Centered Design for microgravity. Alex has worked at the CSIS Aerospace Security Project, was a Matthew Isakowitz Fellow at the XPRIZE Foundation, and Nanoracks, where she worked on the Starlab Commercial LEO Destinations program. Today, her focus is on the commercial business case of satellite disposal in LEO, and engaging with the policy environment for on-orbit servicing operations. She also is deputy director of the Matthew Isakowitz Commercial Space Scholarship, which engages exceptional students with paid space policy summer internships in the DC Metro area.
Matt Gialich
CEO and Co-founder
AstroForge
Matt Gialich is the co-founder and CEO of AstroForge, an aerospace startup building technology to mine asteroids for critical minerals. Founded in 2022, AstroForge is reimagining deep space missions with a fast-moving, vertically integrated approach, focusing on the extraction of platinum group metals (PGMs) from near-Earth asteroids. These metals are critical to clean energy technologies, medical applications, and high-performance electronics.
Under Gialich’s leadership, the company has raised over $70 million and has already launched its first mission to deep space. AstroForge is preparing for its second and most ambitious deep space mission, DeepSpace-2, which will analyze the surface composition of a metallic asteroid.
The company now employs over 50 engineers and staff and continues to grow rapidly. Gialich’s bold, iterative approach to building space hardware - rooted in lessons from previous missions - is helping redefine how private companies can pursue ambitious scientific and commercial goals beyond Earth.
