Funding the Future – The Ultimate Guide to Aerospace Innovation Financing
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MODERATOR
STEPHEN CHEUNG serves as the president and CEO of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) and its subsidiary, the World Trade Center Los Angeles (WTCLA). In this dual role, Cheung leads the organization’s vision to build a Coalition of One – Economy for All to benefit all Angelenos. Since assuming the role in 2023, he has spearheaded a comprehensive reimagining of the organization’s mission and strategies.
PANELISTS
DR. LEON ALKALAI is a retired technical fellow of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology, where he spent 32 years following the completion of his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1989. At JPL, he worked on several important projects including the GRAIL mission to the Moon (2007) and the InSight lander on Mars (2012). In 2021, Dr. Alkalai founded Mandala Space Ventures, a Pasadena-based incubator dedicated to launching and scaling startups in the emerging space economy.
DR. JON MORSE’S career spans several decades in the space community and includes professorships at major research universities, conducting astrophysics research with Hubble and James Webb Space Telescope data; policy work at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy; followed by leading the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. He is also the co-founder and president of AstronetX PBC, dedicated to frontier scientific discovery and addressing national security objectives.
JAY TAMSETT is a managing director in EY’s Aerospace, Defense, and Mobility practice, advising leaders on national security technology breakthroughs – including space – into secure, high-performance connectivity that can be deployed and scaled for both defense and commercial missions. Prior to joining EY, he served as a principal and director of strategy at Lockheed Martin. He also supported United Launch Alliance (ULA) competing for its first major government block buy in the era of high-cadence and low-cost launch.
KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE PANEL
Translating deep-tech aerospace concepts into scalable, capital-efficient business architectures requires a shift from pure vision to rigorous structural capitalization. The panelists mapped out how defense, science and private equity can converge within premier aerospace hubs like Southern California.
On Unleashing Institutional Intellectual Property
The initial bottleneck in the commercial space economy is not a lack of technological innovation, but an inefficiency in translating institutional research into marketplace realities. National laboratories and elite academic hubs possess a vast repository of dormant intellectual property (IP).
Dr. Leon Alkali: “In Southern California, there’s still so much IP that gets kind of contained and doesn’t get commercialized. So I think that it’s the major obstacle to growing the economy, getting that IP out of the universities, out of the national laboratories and building businesses.”
On Monetizing Dual-Use Architectures
Relying on a single customer class like pure academic science rarely yields a viable business case. High-margin space enterprises survive by creating dual-use monetization strategies that extract multiple data streams from a single hardware asset.
Dr. John Morse: “The astronomer’s “trash” is the space domain awareness treasure. So that’s what we’re doing. Any space telescope by design can do space situational awareness as well... If I only had scientists as customers, it probably wouldn’t close the business model.”
Jay Tamsett: “It’s not the same thing as having what the defense universe would call a capability. A capability is something that you can deliver repeatedly over time while making a profit. And the Department of War is interested in your companies making a profit because they need sustainable capability that can be delivered reliably.”
On Optimizing Capital Inflows and Navigating Procurement
To insulate early-stage startups from premature equity dilution, founders must strategically blend state-sponsored capital with commercial venture funding. Concurrently, public sector procurement models must pivot from rigid individual contracts to broader ecosystem purchasing.
Dr. Alkali: “In the United States we have a very healthy SBA program, STTRs, and so on, and startup companies should go after those non-dilutive grants like crazy – there’s good derisking in that kind of a dual-use approach. So I would strongly recommend dual use. Strongly recommend going after non-dilutive grants.”
Tamsett: “The government hopefully will start buying from a portfolio-based perspective instead of a program perspective creating more opportunities for us the entrepreneurs and the people in private industry who want their kits or their wares to be absorbed.”
On The Imperative of On-Orbit Flight Validation
While computer-aided design (CAD) models and slide decks are essential for early-stage capital formation, they are ultimately insufficient. True commercial acceleration occurs only when an asset achieves hardware validation in the space environment.
Dr. Morse: “Getting to space is everything because I can show you PowerPoint charts and CAD models and all kinds of things; but it’s getting to space and getting data, that’s when things really take off for the company.”
