John Gedmark

John Gedmark is an American entrepreneur and aerospace engineer. He is the co-founder and CEO of Astranis, and was the Founding Executive Director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

Early life
Gedmark was born and raised in Kentucky. He graduated from Purdue's undergraduate Aerospace Engineering program in 2003,[7] and served as the President of his local Students for the Development and Exploration of Space (SEDS) chapter.[8] Gedmark earned his Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering at Stanford University.[9] While at Stanford, Gedmark co-founded the Roosevelt Institute, a public policy think tank for students, which grew to over 80 university campuses nationwide by 2012.[10]

Commercial Spaceflight Federation
In 2005, Gedmark and Peter Diamandis brought together commercial space industry leaders Elon Musk, John Carmack, Alex Tai, and others to promote industry collaboration. This informal industry group became the Personal Spaceflight Federation, and later rebranded to the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Gedmark registered the new Federation as a non-profit dedicated to “resolving the regulatory, legal, political and broad strategic challenges the personal spaceflight industry faces moving forward.”

Over the next five years, Gedmark served as the Federation's Executive Director and represented the shared interests of its members like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and others in Washington D.C. Gedmark was featured in Christian Davenport’s book "Space Barons" for this work.

Astranis
In 2015, Gedmark and Ryan McLinko founded Astranis, with Gedmark as chief executive officer and McLinko as chief technical officer. The company was founded to get the next four billion people online by building smaller, cheaper satellites for broadband internet, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Astranis was admitted into the Y Combinator startup accelerator's Winter 2016 cohort. In early 2018, Astranis announced the successful launch and operation of its first demonstration satellite, a 3U cubesat with a software-defined radio payload and a $18 million Series A fundraising round from Andreessen Horowitz. Astranis raised a Series B financing round of $90 million in 2020, a $250 million Series C financing round in 2021, and a follow-on round of equity and debt financing of $200 million in 2023.

Astranis launched its first commercial satellite in 2023, which had a malfunction in an externally-supplied solar array but which remained on orbit. The company signed a launch contract in April 2022 for SpaceX for another batch of four satellites, which is expected to launch in 2024.