Beyond Reach Labs

The founders bring a complementary blend of industry experience and academic research to the company. Pele Collins spent seven years at SpaceX, where he led the Dragon parachute systems team, gaining expertise in deployment mechanisms and human-rated space hardware. Dr. Mitchell Fogelson holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and has a background in both robotics and aerospace, with a focus on the design of mechanical metamaterials and mechanisms. His passion for interdisciplinary innovation was fostered during his time at Penn Engineering, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics and Robotics, respectively.

Beyond Reach Labs is developing large-scale, deployable solar arrays designed to address the power bottleneck in space. The company's core product is a novel deployable architecture that aims to overcome the traditional trade-offs between size, mass, stiffness, and cost that have limited solar array technology for decades. This technology is engineered to provide significantly more energy per launch, enabling the next generation of orbital infrastructure such as orbital data centers, space stations, and lunar outposts, which require hundreds of kilowatts of power.

The company's business model appears to be centered on providing these advanced power systems to clients in the space sector. They also offer access to their simulation and design tools and are open to collaborations on research projects. By focusing on mechanical metamaterials, Beyond Reach Labs leverages artificially engineered substances with properties not found in nature to create structures that can be reconfigured, are lightweight, and exhibit high strength-to-density ratios. This approach addresses the critical challenge in space engineering where structural dynamics limit the size of deployable structures like solar arrays.