Angelica Sirotin 10/8/26 Angelica Sirotin 10/8/26

Dave Beck on Building a Space Economy Across State Lines

Dave Beck on Building a Space Economy Across State Lines

Space Rising’s Secure Space Council Chair sees an opportunity to connect Southern California’s experience with Arizona’s capabilities, while making sure the knowledge needed to build the next generation of space systems reaches the people who will use it.

DEFENSE / WORKFORCE / REGIONAL COLLABORATION

By Angelica Sirotin | Oct 9, 2026 | Space Rising

Dave Beck is thinking about the people who know how to build things.

In Southern California, he sees experienced engineers, manufacturing specialists, and tool-and-die workers whose knowledge could help a new generation of space companies. He also sees a reason to act soon.

“That knowledge is getting seasoned,” he says. “And that knowledge might not be around forever.”

For Beck, developing the space economy means making better use of that experience: connecting it to younger teams, giving capable people opportunities to contribute, and building relationships across regions that have something to offer one another.

As Chair of Space Rising’s Secure Space Council, he brings a career spanning military service, manufacturing, autonomous systems, and government. His Space Rising profile identifies him as Principal of Space Technologies LTD, with work focused on industrial capabilities and technologies serving commercial and defense needs.

His vision reaches across state lines. He wants Southern California and Arizona to understand more clearly what they could build together.

Learning how the pieces connect

Beck’s interest in space began with Star Wars and Star Trek while growing up in the South. Turning that interest into a career took him through the industries and institutions that make complex technology possible.

After college and five years of combined active and reserve service in the Marine Corps, he pursued hands-on engineering work. His experience included chemical processing, automotive manufacturing, aircraft engines, and fuselages.

Later, work in autonomous vehicles brought him into computer systems, operating architectures, and the relationship between technology and dependable transportation.

Government added another perspective. Beck wanted to understand how agencies evaluate technology, approach regulation, and consider its implications for the public. His experience extended across transportation and defense, including service as a U.S. Space Force branch chief, a role documented in NordSpace’s 2025 conference program.

Together, those experiences shaped how he sees the space sector.

“You look at space like an umbrella,” he says. “Everything’s connected under the umbrella.”

A technology’s prospects depend on the surrounding capabilities: the people who can manufacture it, the systems needed to operate it, and the organizations prepared to support its use.

The influence closest to home

Asked who helped him find his direction, Beck names his uncle.

“He was the first in our family to go in the Marine Corps.”

His uncle also had a science background and worked in water purification in Los Angeles. Through him, Beck began to understand the engineering involved in something as fundamental as access to water.

That early exposure helped connect scientific curiosity to practical responsibility. Water, infrastructure, and the systems people depend on became subjects he could see and understand through someone else’s work.

Beck credits that mentorship with helping shape his own development as a systems engineer. The relationship remains important enough that he chose to live nearby so he could be available to support his family.

His concern about passing knowledge to the next generation has a personal foundation. He knows what it meant to have someone make an unfamiliar field accessible.

Recognizing the work people can do

When the conversation turns to obstacles, Beck raises the weight placed on academic pedigree.

He believes the space industry has an opportunity to give greater consideration to a person’s accumulated work: what they have built, the problems they have solved, and the judgment they have developed.

He recalls a recent conversation in which a venture-capital contact praised his experience while suggesting that his academic background could reduce his chances of being selected for an opportunity. For Beck, it illustrated how easily useful experience can be discounted.

His response is to keep building a record that people can evaluate.

“Your reputation is all you have,” he says. “And you have to build it.”

“It takes a lot of years and work to build that, but it only takes a few seconds for it to fall down.”

That emphasis on demonstrated contribution also informs his view of workforce development. An industry seeking more capable people needs ways to recognize the experience already available to it.

Carrying experience into the next generation

Beck wants Southern California to build on the depth of expertise associated with its aerospace history, including the Space Shuttle program.

“There’s a lot of talent here,” he says. “There’s a lot of hard work ethic.”

He would like to see stronger collaboration among the state, industry, and workforce organizations to help that experience reach emerging companies and younger workers. He is particularly concerned about manufacturing knowledge that could leave the industry as experienced people retire.

His current work also extends into Canada. Beck describes helping NordSpace develop relationships and opportunities in the U.S. market, building on connections established during his government career.

The conversation took place shortly after NordSpace’s Terra Nova satellite launched on Oct 1, 2026 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission. On Oct 5, 2026, the company reported successful early operations in orbit.

Beck spoke about what such milestones mean to the engineers who make them possible. He sees the relationships among the United States, Canada, and Mexico as deeply interconnected, with opportunities to strengthen the wider space community through collaboration.

Connecting Southern California and Arizona

For Beck, the regional opportunity is already personal. He has family in Phoenix and has spent parts of his career working with companies in the Phoenix and Tucson areas.

He sees capabilities on both sides of the state line that could complement one another.

“I would love to see a coalition of the willing here in Southern California with the state of Arizona,” he says.

His interest is in identifying where organizations can contribute to a shared effort, including technologies with both commercial and defense applications. Better communication is central to that work. Companies and institutions need to understand what others can do, what they need, and where cooperation would be useful.

For Space Rising’s Secure Space Council, his perspective suggests several practical starting points:

Connect organizations around a defined need.

Identify a specific engineering, manufacturing, or operational requirement, then explore which capabilities in Arizona and Southern California could help address it.

Give experienced practitioners a role in developing new talent.

Explore ways for established engineers and manufacturing specialists to work with emerging teams on real problems, making their judgment and experience accessible.

Turn an introduction into a concrete next step.

A potential collaboration becomes easier to assess when participants can identify the work, their respective contributions, and the questions that still need answers.

These are opportunities to explore through the council’s work. Beck’s larger ambition is to make it easier for people with complementary experience to recognize one another and begin building.

“Let’s put everybody on a particular path and build something special,” he says.

For Arizona and Southern California, that path could begin with a better understanding of the people and capabilities already within reach.

Have a story the space community should hear?

We’d love to hear what you’re working on. Talk to us about a sponsored feature in Space Rising, with an interview-led article and a custom magazine cover your team can share.

Get in touch: angelica@spacerising.org

Dave Beck | Principal, Space Technologies LTD | Secure Space Council

This interview was conducted by Space Rising. Quotes have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Angelica Sirotin 5/28/19 Angelica Sirotin 5/28/19

Ecem Badruk, Founding Chair of Space Rising’s Live in Space Council, on Bringing Space Biotech to Earth

Ecem Badruk, Founding Chair of Space Rising’s Live in Space Council, on Bringing Space Biotech to Earth
Ecem Badruk | Founder, Business Developer | Connect with Ecem

LIFE SCIENCES / COMMERCIALIZATION

Ecem Badruk wants more biotech and pharmaceutical companies involved in space-based research. For Arizona, her work raises a practical question: what would give them a reason to participate?

By Angelica Sirotin | Sept 30, 2026 | Space Rising

Ecem Badruk was already a bioengineer when her nephew’s fascination with planets made her look more closely at space. A couple of months later, a project involving bioprinting in space came her way. She began researching what was happening beyond Earth in her own field.

She found work involving drug development and biological experiments she had never seriously considered. “I’m a bioengineer, and I’d never thought about [space biotech] before,” she recalls. The more she read, the more she wanted to be part of it. “And then I said, ‘I’m gonna do this.’”

Badruk now joins Space Rising’s Live in Space Council as its Founding Chair. A bioengineer specializing in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, she brings business development experience across biotech and deep technology. She is also the founder of Women in Space Biotech, an initiative supporting visibility, collaboration and leadership in the space life sciences community.

As she explored the field, she came across Jana Stoudemire’s work. Stoudemire became an important source of inspiration and someone with whom she could discuss space biotechnology and possible ways to work together. Her nephew still prefers the planets, she noted. The interest they share has taken her into subjects he is not quite ready to discuss.

Her own introduction to space biotechnology helps explain the audience she is trying to reach today. She had relevant scientific training before she understood the possibilities. She suspects there are many more people in biotech and pharmaceuticals who could contribute, once they can see how the work connects to their own.

The business conversation is harder

Asked what has been difficult, Badruk separates the engineering challenges from the business of getting people involved. She has confidence in the researchers and engineers working through the technical problems. “We have challenges, yes, but we are trying to find a way.”

The business side has been harder. In conversations with biotechnology and pharmaceutical professionals, she often encounters limited familiarity with space-based research. She sees that lack of awareness restricting participation. More people working in the field would, in her view, mean more experiments and a stronger body of results to examine.

She revisits the word “convincing.” What she wants is to show prospective collaborators the research and explain its relevance to projects they already understand. She believes some findings make a compelling case for further work. Getting those findings in front of the right people has become part of her job.

That is why she takes part in pharmaceutical and biotech conferences and webinars. She wants the conversation to reach people in their own professional settings, where they can consider what a space-based experiment might mean for a problem they are already trying to solve.

“We are not talking in the same language.”

Badruk is describing the difficulty of working across aerospace engineering, bioengineering and molecular biology. Each discipline brings its own vocabulary. Space professionals may not understand what a biotech company needs; biotech professionals may be equally unfamiliar with the space sector. “We need more people to talk to both sides,” she says.

Biological products made in space, used on Earth

Her longer-term ambition is to build a scientific and entrepreneurial community capable of manufacturing biological products in space and bringing them back to Earth. Asked about five to ten years, she considers five optimistic. Ten is the horizon she is working toward, although the conversation is about her ambition rather than a product delivery schedule.

She points to microgravity as an unusual experimental environment and to the different cellular behavior researchers can investigate there. “We are going to have biological products which are made in space,” she says. The outcome she pictures is a product label: “made in space” alongside “made in Germany” or “made in USA.”

The patient remains central to that vision. Someone taking a medicine is generally concerned with getting better, she says, rather than the country where it was made. She applies the same reasoning to a future product manufactured in space. Its relevance would come from what it could do for the person who needs it.

What this could mean for Arizona

Arizona has places to begin the conversation. ASU’s Biodesign Institute has documented research involving microgravity and three-dimensional tissue models. AZBio brings together businesses, researchers and health care organizations across the state’s life sciences sector. Badruk’s interview suggests a way to connect that work with the space economy through specific research needs and possible projects.

For the Live in Space Council, the following are practical starting points to explore with Arizona’s companies and researchers.

Begin with a biomedical problem

Invite life sciences teams to bring a question from work already underway. A tissue-engineering group or a drug-development team could describe what its current methods cannot yet answer. A space research specialist could then help assess whether microgravity offers a relevant way to investigate it. The first discussion should establish what evidence would make further work worthwhile.

Make introductions around a defined need

Use those questions to identify prospective collaborators. Depending on the project, that might mean introducing a researcher to a payload developer, an automation company or a laboratory able to analyze returned samples. Ask each participant what it can contribute and what it still needs. AZBio’s network and university research groups could provide places to begin outreach; their involvement would need to be discussed.

Give the first project a manageable scope

A useful early outcome could be a short feasibility brief for one proposed experiment. Identify the Earth-based comparison and the result the team hopes to measure. Establish which facilities or flight services would be needed, with preliminary costs and responsibilities for follow-up. That would give prospective partners something concrete to evaluate before making a larger commitment.

Bring specific decisions to Space Congress

Ahead of Space Congress on April 20, 2027, in Phoenix, the council could gather candidate projects and the questions preventing them from progressing. Participants could then identify which collaborations merit follow-up and which gaps belong in the Arizona Space Blueprint. A practical measure of progress would be whether a team leaves with an agreed next step and a person responsible for it.

For Badruk, a project made the connection between her training and space tangible. Arizona’s researchers and companies could find their own entry points in much the same way, through a question worth investigating and someone prepared to work on it with them.