Co-founder & CTO at Beyond Reach Labs
Building space megastructures for orbital power
Building space megastructures that pack into a single rocket and deploy to football-field scale in orbit — delivering 10× more usable power per launch by avoiding the traditional weight-vs-power tradeoff. Spent 6 years at SpaceX leading parachute engineering and production for the Dragon program across 30+ missions, with prior experience as Plasma-Facing-Components Technical Team Lead at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Beyond Reach Labs (YC W26) builds deployable solar arrays and thermal radiators for orbital data centers, commercial space stations, and lunar outposts — backed by Y Combinator, Carnegie Mellon, NASA, NSF, and NIAC, with $175M+ in letters of intent and a first in-space demonstration targeted for Q2 2027.
Episode featuring Pele Collins will be out soon.
Beyond Reach Labs builds deployable space megastructures — solar arrays and thermal radiators that pack into a single rocket and unfold to football-field scale in orbit. Their patented design delivers 10× more usable power per launch without the traditional weight-versus-power tradeoff, targeting orbital data centers, commercial space stations, and lunar outposts.
Orbital power demand is on track to grow from roughly 50 megawatts today to 500+ gigawatts by 2035, driven by mega-constellations and in-space data centers. As arrays get longer, their structural resonance frequencies drop, causing vibration interference — a problem Beyond Reach solves with patented deployable designs that achieve greater rigidity while extending reach.
Pele Collins (CTO) spent 6 years at SpaceX leading parachute engineering and production for the Dragon program across 30+ missions, and previously served as Plasma-Facing-Components Technical Team Lead at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Mitchell Fogelson (CEO) earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon, working with NASA on the design, simulation, and optimization of kilometer-scale deployable space structures, with publications in top robotics and aerospace venues including a Best Paper Award from ASME JMD 2023. They've been building together since freshman year at UPenn in 2013.
Beyond Reach Labs (YC W26) is backed by Y Combinator, Carnegie Mellon, NASA, NSF, and NIAC. The company has accumulated $175M+ in letters of intent from space companies and is targeting its first in-space demonstration for Q2 2027.
Launch volume and mass are the dominant constraints on space hardware. A deployable structure stows compactly inside the rocket fairing and self-expands once on orbit. Beyond Reach's arrays go from dining-table size at launch to football-field dimensions deployed — the same launch budget yields an order of magnitude more surface area for power generation or heat rejection.
Co-founder & CTO
