The Top SpaceTech Startups in YC S26
The space companies in YC's Summer 2026 batch are building physical infrastructure. All three have hardware in progress, with engine tests, booked launches, and mission dates already on the calendar. Here are the top space startups (in no particular order) from the batch.
Ethos Space Resources — Silicon from lunar regolith
Ethos Space Resources (ethos-space.com) is building industrial capability on the Moon: landing pads, liquid oxygen extracted from regolith, and, at the center of the plan, silicon refined from material already on the surface. The logic is that solar panels and compute both come from silicon, and the panels produced on the Moon can power the refining of more silicon. That makes the growth of power and mass in space a function of what is already there rather than what a rocket can carry.
Ross Centers, the CEO, is a lunar resource geologist who trained at the Colorado School of Mines and previously founded the Planetary Sunshade Institute. CTO Brogan BamBrogan was SpaceX's 23rd employee and worked on the Falcon 1 second-stage engine and Dragon elements including the heat shield and Draco thrusters, then co-founded Hyperloop One and Arrivo. The company has completed a NASA contract and is targeting a lunar mission in 2028.
Exosat — A sovereign alternative to Starlink
Exosat (exosat.com) is building thousands of low-cost communications satellites for governments and operators that want capacity they control. The design point is a satellite with no ITAR or EAR-controlled content, which lets the company use manufacturers and launch providers outside the United States, reach equatorial orbits, and build with automotive-grade parts. Exosat puts the cost of one satellite with a three-to-five-year life at roughly $300,000 against an industry norm closer to $5M, and flies lower than incumbents such as AST and Iridium for better link budgets and a gentler radiation environment.
Founder and CEO Edward Ge previously co-founded Aethero, which built radiation-hardened GPUs for satellite edge computing, launched two satellites including one carrying an Nvidia Orin, and sold to customers including Blue Origin and AFRL. Exosat has booked its first launch for April and published ITU filings for an 11,000-satellite constellation. Initial revenue is expected to come from selling connectivity to device makers and network operators, with distributed inference across the constellation as the longer-term product.
"We're building a satellite at under 10% of the cost to dominate 80% of the market instead of going after everyone."
Edward Ge, CEO of ExosatHop Aero — Rocket cargo to contested environments
Hop Aero (hopaero.com) is building Rook, an autonomous rocket that carries 250 kg of cargo up to 750 km and lands on unprepared ground. It launches from a standard 40-foot shipping container and re-enters at hypersonic speed, which puts Okinawa to Taiwan inside a 15-minute flight. The military case is delivering supplies or swarms of uncrewed systems into places aircraft cannot reliably reach; the commercial case is time-critical parts for industries where a stopped line costs millions an hour.
CEO Matija Milenovic previously founded porkchop, an electric propulsion company that flew on SpaceX's Transporter-3 mission and later sold its IP, and led a supersonic UAV team at Destinus. CTO Jacob Balaj spent a decade in launch integration and test at SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, Masten Space Systems, and SpinLaunch, after avionics work on MV-22 tiltrotors in the Marine Corps. The company has won a $1.25M Air Force contract, hot-fired its engine and igniter, completed a tethered test of a small-scale prototype at the Oklahoma spaceport, and demonstrated drone deployment from the vehicle.
All three are betting that the constraint on space activity is logistics rather than ambition, and each is attacking a different link in that chain.