Bid to win a meeting with Dennis Wingo, Founder and CEO at Skycorp in San Francisco, CA!
Skycorp's mission is to fundamentally transform the spacecraft industry, utilizing orbital assembly process, electric propulsion, and modular construction, to create applications unthinkable before. Skycorp Incorporated was founded in 1998 to develop new technologies, new approaches, and reduced cost to the manufacture of spacecraft and space systems. Bringing change to a mature industry such as aerospace is hard. Most of the legacy aerospace sector is heavily influenced by government contracts and contracting practices and thus innovation is difficult, slow, and expensive. Innovation has stagnated for most of the sector since the death of Howard Hughes in the 1970's.
New companies such as SpaceX have brought some significant and welcome changes to the industry, many of these changes harken back to Hughes, but more must be done if the commercial satellite industry is to remain competitive in comparison to the unfettered terrestrial communications industry. Since its founding Skycorp has been involved in many advanced technology projects. Skycorp gained one of the very first Space Act Agreements with NASA for the use of the International Space Station (ISS) in 1999 for the deployment of satellites. Skycorp qualified the first commercial payload used in the filming of a television commercial for Radio Shack in 2001. Skycorp engineers designed the first commercial on orbit servicing system for Orbital Recovery in the middle 2000’s. Skycorp has also led the technical efforts in an eclectic set of projects, such as the recovery of original images from the 1960’s Lunar Orbiter Apollo precursor mission, the Nimbus High Resolution Infrared Radiometer (HRIR) instrument, to reformat for modern science and preserve them for posterity.
Skycorp has also accomplished the near impossible with the successful recovery of the ISEE-3 spacecraft, left dormant in interplanetary space for decades. Skycorp is also looking into the future. We are building an entire line of advanced electric propulsion spacecraft for missions as diverse as transporting cubesats from ISS to higher destinations, including to the Moon and beyond. These modular spacecraft will also be employed for communications, on orbit servicing, and new applications not yet employed in space. At Skycorp we believe that the economic development of the solar system, beginning with financially solid applications in Earth orbit is the ultimate black swan of civilization, freeing us from artificial limits to growth, and helping to pave mankind’s path to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Dennis has over 36 years worth of experience in the computer, academic, and aerospace industries. He worked for many leading edge companies during the 80's such as Vector Graphic, Symbolics, and Alpharel, pioneers in the computer, artificial intelligence, and document management industries. Wingo built flight hardware at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, including the first MacIntosh flown on the Space Shuttle and a small sat, SEDSAT 1, the first non NASA spacecraft built in Alabama.