When senior executives at Relativity Space, Hermeus, Divergent Technologies, and Astrion decide to leave their positions simultaneously for the same seed-stage startup, it tells you something about how aerospace insiders are reading the market. Fortastra, a company founded in 2025 to build maneuverable spacecraft for on-orbit security, has assembled a C-suite drawn from companies that collectively represent billions in venture funding and government contracts. The talent migration itself is the signal: people with deep experience in rocket avionics, hypersonic aircraft, and defense launch operations believe the on-orbit security market is about to move fast enough to justify the risk of joining a company that hasn’t yet built hardware.
The company announced three C-suite and VP-level appointments: Josh Jetter as chief technology officer, Sahil Desai as vice president of product, and Arnold Nowinski as vice president of people. Each comes from a company that has dealt with the specific engineering and organizational problems Fortastra will face as it tries to build spacecraft capable of rapid orbital maneuver in contested space environments.
The Pattern Matters More Than the Résumés
The individual backgrounds are less important than what they share. Jetter oversaw avionics engineering and manufacturing at Relativity Space, which has raised substantial venture funding. He described joining Fortastra as an opportunity to work on complex space operations challenges and build reliable, scalable systems. Desai ran aerospace and defense programs at Divergent Technologies and before that directed programs at Hermeus, the hypersonic aircraft maker—a combination of defense program management and rapid prototyping that maps precisely onto a company that will need to sell to both government and commercial buyers. Nowinski was vice president and general manager at Astrion Space Launch and Sciences, supporting government launch operations; his hire signals that Fortastra views organizational scaling as a near-term constraint, not a distant concern.
People move for various reasons: equity, mission alignment, frustration with their previous employer, or a belief that the new company’s market opportunity is unusually large. When multiple experienced executives make similar moves simultaneously, it usually signals something about how insiders perceive the competitive dynamics in a sector. The on-orbit security market is generating enough conviction among people with deep aerospace experience to pull them out of established, well-funded companies and into a startup with seed-stage funding.
The Hermeus Thread
Fortastra’s founder and CEO, Mike Smayda, was a senior aerodynamics engineer at SpaceX before co-founding Hermeus, where he served as chief product officer. The Hermeus connection runs through the company like a thread: both Smayda and Desai spent time there, and the hypersonic startup’s emphasis on rapid iteration and government contracting appears to inform Fortastra’s approach.
Smayda described his new leadership team as bringing world-class experience from demanding and innovative sectors across engineering, product strategy, and organizational leadership, adding that the diversity of expertise provides advantages as the company develops mission-critical systems for government and commercial partners.
The company raised seed funding late last year. For a company designing spacecraft rather than software, that’s a modest war chest, enough perhaps to mature early designs and demonstrate key subsystems but nowhere near what full vehicle development will require.
The Capability Gap Fortastra Is Targeting
Fortastra’s spacecraft will feature advanced guidance, navigation, and control systems enabling rapid maneuver, rendezvous and proximity operations, and mission assurance in what it calls degraded environments—situations where adversaries are actively trying to disrupt satellites. The pitch rests on the argument that existing satellite architectures are too static for a contested space environment.
The demand signal from the U.S. military is real. Military officials have warned about concurrent and accelerating threats in space. Beijing has demonstrated proximity operations around defunct Chinese spacecraft and operational Western satellites. Defense analysts have raised concerns about Chinese satellites with robotic arms and their potential capabilities for engaging other spacecraft. Russia has reportedly performed operations deploying smaller spacecraft from larger ones, sometimes described as nesting doll maneuvers.
Space Systems Command has identified significant gaps in orbital maneuvering capabilities that could take years to address through traditional acquisition channels. The Space Force’s Commercial Space Office has been exploring options for maneuverable satellites capable of operating in geostationary orbit, while the Space Rapid Capabilities Office’s Rapid Resilient Command and Control program is investing in cloud-based ground infrastructure to support satellites that protect and defend on-orbit assets. That combination—urgent threat perception, acknowledged capability gaps, and active solicitation of new concepts—creates an opening for startups with credible technical teams. The supply chain for the Pentagon’s satellite ambitions remains a persistent constraint, which only widens the aperture for new entrants.
What Fortastra Still Has to Prove
Hiring experienced executives is a necessary step but not a sufficient one. Fortastra has early-stage funding, a small team, and a set of claims about what its spacecraft will eventually do. It has not announced any government contracts, and its technology has not been demonstrated on orbit.
Wanting a capability and buying it from a seed-stage startup are different things. Government procurement cycles, even accelerated ones, take time. And the on-orbit security market already has established players working on adjacent technologies. Astroscale U.S., for instance, holds a Space Systems Command contract to develop an in-space refueling spacecraft with a demonstration planned for the mid-2020s. The refueling problem is distinct from the maneuverable security vehicle Fortastra is describing, but it lives in the same broader category of on-orbit services and operations.
The real question for Fortastra is whether it can move from executive announcements to hardware fast enough to catch the current wave of Pentagon spending. The defense space budget is growing. Program offices are actively soliciting new concepts. But the window between initial military interest and contract awards can close quickly, and conviction among a handful of aerospace executives—however informed—may or may not be validated by contracts and customers.
Fortastra’s next milestones will matter more than its org chart. The company needs to demonstrate technology, secure government contracts, and raise significantly more capital. The executive team it has assembled suggests it is serious about those objectives. Whether it can execute against them in a competitive and budget-constrained environment is the open question the company will spend the next 12 to 18 months answering.
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