Astra today announced that Benjamin Lyon will join Astra as Chief Engineer. Lyon has led the development of core technologies for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
“Benjamin Lyon helped form Apple’s original autonomous electric car team in 2014 as its most senior manager working on sensors,” Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg News. “He remained on the team through its various reboots over the past several years, and most recently led a self-driving car sensors team reporting directly to Doug Field, Apple’s vice president in charge of the car project.”
“Astra presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apply my experience designing and manufacturing beautiful products to ignite a new wave of innovation in the space industry,” said Lyon. “Astra is incredibly well-positioned to enable a new generation of space services, and the possibilities for humanity are endless.”
Astra recently announced plans to go public on Nasdaq and raise over $500M through a business combination with Holicity, Inc., in order to productize and mass-produce spaceports, rockets, and satellites and build a space services platform.
“We are thrilled to have Benjamin join us as we enter a new phase of growth at Astra,” said Chris Kemp, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Astra. “Benjamin’s unique experience helping to design and manufacture products at scale will accelerate our mission of improving life on Earth from space.”
After becoming the fastest privately-funded company in history to demonstrate orbital launch capability in December, Astra is preparing to deliver commercial payloads this summer and start monthly launches by the end of this year, scaling up to daily launches by 2025.
MacDailyNews Note: Astra was founded in October 2016 by Chris Kemp and Adam London with the mission of launching a new generation of space services to improve life on Earth. More info here.
Huh? No. Astra was launched as a gov contractor — touting itself as a strong Capitalist in its PR boilerplate but knows internally that it is really a corporate Socialist as an open secret — to feed out of big government’s taxpayer-funded trough. These kinds of corporations usually locate themselves in a circle around major government departments.
Respectfully, Socialist means owned by the government. The VA, the Post Office, the Police Department and most Fire Departments are socialist. Contractors are capitalist. Privately owned, providing goods and services for capital. It is not unusual for companies to start off as solely selling to the government then branching out to the private sector.
In the great depression the government hired artists to create art for public spaces (like the mural in my local post office), would you call them socialists because they got paid by the government?