Hayden Burgoyne LogoHayden A Burgoyne

Mission: Mining Asteroids and Ensuring AI Represents Folks Like Us

Background

Systems engineer and startup builder working at the edge of spacecraft and AI. I spent five years on NASA's Europa Clipper at JPL, led engineering at a YC-backed asteroid-mining startup, founded an AI company, and now architect orbital data centers at Sophia Space.

Experience

  1. Sophia Space

    Oct 2025 – Present

    Product Systems Engineer

    Building space-based edge compute and orbital data centers.

    • Leading early system architecture and engineering for the first demonstration missions of Sophia Space TILEs and Orbital Data Centers.
    • Technical lead for a growing set of commercial and government partnerships; shaping the technology roadmap with the co-founders.
    sophia.space

  2. UsFolks.ai

    Jun 2025 – Oct 2025

    Founder

    AI for better constituent representation — a "Perplexity for Polling."

    • Selected for 50 Years VC’s 5050 Founders Program and the Menlo Ventures Menlo Labs Fellowship.
    • Built several full-stack AI products using LLMs, RAG pipelines, fine-tuning, and synthetic polling models; ran customer discovery with officials, campaigns, and policy groups.

  3. TransAstra

    Mar 2022 – Oct 2025

    Director of Engineering

    YC (S21) startup building the technology to find, capture, and mine asteroids.

    • Led ~15 engineers across robotic telescopes and inflatable capture bags for debris removal and asteroid capture.
    • Fielded three Sutter robotic telescope systems for Space Force customers ahead of schedule; flew a Capture Bag demonstrator on the ISS in September 2025.
    • First author on US Patent 12,198,356 for matched-filter tracking of space objects — and uplinked the algorithm to a CubeSat in orbit to observe spacecraft in GEO.
    • Wrote winning SBIR and TACFI proposals worth ~$8.4M in non-dilutive funding.
    PatentISS Capture BagOn-orbit tracking

  4. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

    Oct 2017 – Mar 2022

    Systems Engineer · Phase & Analysis Lead, Europa Clipper

    Europa Clipper launched in 2024 to assess whether Europa’s ocean could support life.

    • Built the models and simulations of the spacecraft, its tour of the Jovian system, and operations of its nine science instruments that the project still uses for key decisions.
    • Led a team of 8 engineers performing probabilistic risk assessments presented to NASA HQ at gate reviews — work that enabled architecture improvements saving more than $250M.
    • NASA Early Career Achievement Medal (2022) and JPL Charles Elachi Award for Outstanding Early Career Achievement (2021).

  5. Hedron (formerly Analytical Space)

    Apr 2016 – Oct 2017

    VP of Spacecraft Systems · Employee #1

    Seed-stage startup building a commercial data-relay CubeSat constellation.

    • Owned systems and mechanical engineering for the first demonstration spacecraft, deployed from the ISS in July 2018.
    • 2016 MassChallenge Platinum Prize winner.

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