Laura Crabtree

Yo, so let me tell you about Laura Crabtree. This chick is the real deal in the space game. She’s a YC alum from S21, and she’s been crushing it in the aerospace world for over a decade. Before jumping into startups, she was at Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, yeah, the big leagues. She worked on almost 100 rocket launches, played a key role on the Falcon 9, Dragon, and the whole commercial crew thing. She was on console for SpaceX’s first-ever Dragon flight to the ISS, no joke, she was right there for history.

What’s wild is she’s not just a rocket nerd, she’s a software genius too. She co-founded Epsilon3, which is basically the software brains for spacecraft ops and complex engineering stuff. She jumped into YC’s summer batch of 2021, which is kinda rare for space startups that usually stick to hardware. But she saw the bigger picture, software is the future of space, and she’s building the platform to make space missions smoother, safer, and more fast.

Her background is super interesting, she’s got a master’s focused on process efficiency, which totally influences how she built Epsilon3. She’s all about making things work better, faster, and smarter. That’s probably why her company’s been able to get so much traction so fast.

And she’s more than just about her own stuff. She’s an angel investor too, backing space and tech startups like Apolink. It’s obvious she’s all in on the future of space and tech, she’s not just trying to build her empire, she’s out here helping others break into the game.

Bottom line: Laura’s the kind of person who’s been on the frontlines of space exploration, then pivoted to build the software backbone that’s gonna power the next wave of space missions. She’s motivated by making space more accessible, reliable, and expandable, and she’s doing it by combining her deep industry experience with killer software skills. No cap, she’s one of the most interesting people in the space startup scene right now, a legit innovator, a history-maker, and someone who’s gonna be shaping the future of space for a long time.