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Profile
Dr. Joel Sercel is a proven space technology pioneer whose technical expertise spans space mission design, space propulsion, satellite design, architectural design, and systems engineering. He is the founder and CEO of TransAstra Corporation, a space logistics and space mining company based in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 2017, TransAstra is advancing the industrialization and settlement of space through the sustainable and ethical development of critical, dual-use space infrastructure technologies powered by the resources of space and the energy of the sun.
Dr. Sercel holds the record for number of funding awards given by NASA's NIAC program. He spent 14 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab where he led the conception and definition of the NSTAR ion propulsion system - currently in use on the Dawn spacecraft in orbit around the asteroid Ceres. Subsequently, he held a senior government position in the Air Force as the Chief Systems Engineer of the Transformational Satellite Communications System program, a $22B military satellite system that was under development. He is credited with having invented Optical Mining, a practical method for extracting the ingredients in rocket propellant from asteroids. Dr. Sercel is also the lead inventor on the Radiant Gas Dynamic (RGD) method of lunar water harvesting and the Sunflower power tower architecture which is poised to provide low cost electric power to lunar polar regions.
Dr. Sercel has served on many engineering and science review boards and teams including in 2016 the National Academy of Science Air Force Studies Board on “The Role of Experimentation Campaigns in the Air Force Innovation Life Cycle” and the NASA ARM Formulation Assessment and Support Team (FAST). He was the Founding CTO of a Y Combinator space company that has since gone public.
Dr. Sercel’s expertise and leadership have been sought out by world class organizations including NASA, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin.
Sessions