Scaling Aerospace Innovation From Municipal Codes to Low Earth Orbit

MODERATOR

El Segundo Mayor CHRIS PIMENTEL is a risk management executive and a former Marine Corps infantry officer. Pimentel was elected mayor on in 2024 by his fellow council members and has served on the El Segundo City Council since 2018. He has served on several committees focused on interaction with other cities and the state. Pimentel focuses much of his effort on preserving and sustaining the elements of El Segundo that make it the thriving engine of the region.

PANELISTS

JORDAN CROOM is a mechanical/aerospace engineer by training with diverse skills and experience in fields including UAVs, additive manufacturing, satellites, robotics and AVs. At Varda Space Industries, he serves as VP of payloads. Croom is particularly excited by challenging, complex, cross-functional problems with broad impact. Investing in frontier/deep/hard tech in verticals such as space, infrastructure, climate, energy, robotics and manufacturing.

PHILIP JUNE is vice president of Program Integration at Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing Company. Millennium Space Systems is a small satellite prime, delivering high-performance constellation solutions for National Security Space. In this role, June is responsible for driving positive business performance across the Space Mission Systems portfolio, including commercial and government satellites and ground systems.

LIZ STEIN is a managing director at USIT Fund, investing in growth-stage commercial companies with critical technologies relevant to the national interest. She leads deals in compute, AI, space, connectivity, energy and defense tech. Prior to becoming an investor, Stein spent 15 years as an aerospace engineer where she developed rocket propulsion technologies, clean energy combustors and hypersonic systems at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

SIMON WADDINGTON is the co-founder and CEO of Cambium. The company’s goal is to build the next great industrial materials platform for the physical world, redefining how advanced materials are invented, scaled and delivered for defense and high-performance industrial applications. Prior to Cambium, Waddington was the co-founder and CEO of Abunda and also spent more than a decade in venture capital investing across materials, life sciences and related technologies in the U.S., Europe and Israel.

KEY INSIGHTS FROM THE PANEL

This spirited panel centered on the material and manufacturing realities underpinning the next decade of space commerce, where participants dissected the operational bottlenecks of scaling hard tech. The panel shifted focus to the foundational layers of the space economy: domestic supply chain stability, a specialized tech workforce pipelines and the transition of orbital environments into routine industrial infrastructure. They underscored that space exploration is ultimately bounded by the agility of Earth-bound manufacturing and speed at which regulatory and credit frameworks can modernize.

On Scaling and a Speedy Operational Clock

Waddington: “To effectively scale aerospace innovation and counter international adversaries like China, we must radically accelerate our operational clock speed across discovery, prototyping and material certification. Achieving this requires transitioning space from an obscure frontier to a foundational infrastructure layer, which demands that we secure our domestic supply chains against volatile foreign dependencies and cultivate a specialized, technical workforce through localized apprenticeship and community college pipelines.”

On Leveraging Private Credit and Demand Signals to Protect Venture Equity

Stein: “A highly competitive aerospace sector requires a commercial-forward approach focused on hitting high-volume production without draining valuable equity capital on physical infrastructure. The federal government can best accelerate this transition by establishing long-term, high-volume purchasing commitments, creating clear demand signals that allow growth-stage startups to safely draw against debt and private credit markets rather than diluting their equity away on concrete.”

On Institutionalizing Production and Systems Engineering to Weather Defense Shifts

June: “Sustaining America’s trajectory into the 2030 space economy depends entirely on our ability to build robust workforce pipelines and implement highly disciplined, predictable production systems. To scale complex aerospace hardware effectively while continuing to innovate, companies must maintain rigorous systems engineering and change-management frameworks that ensure a stable, resilient response whenever operational disruptions or shifting defense mission requirements inevitably occur.”

On Anchoring Orbital Manufacturing to Earth Markets

Croom: “The true expansion of the space economy lies in seamlessly anchoring it to the Earth economy – leveraging the unique microgravity environment to manufacture high-value physical goods like pharmaceuticals and semiconductors that offer tangible health and technological benefits on the ground. To successfully scale this automated supply chain from quarterly to weekly cadences, federal regulators must adapt and scale their oversight frameworks to efficiently accommodate non-traditional orbital re-entry and spectrum edge cases without throttling commercial agility.”

On Modernizing Municipal Codes and Treating Industrial Capacity as a Civic Asset

Pimentel: “For premier aerospace tech hubs to successfully anchor full-scale manufacturing within domestic borders, municipal and federal governance must actively modernize obsolete regulatory codes and treat industrial capacity as a civic asset rather than a zoning hurdle. Securing this future requires a continuous public-private feedback loop that aggressively evangelizes technical workforce development programs and clearly demonstrates to taxpayers that smart deregulation directly underwrites high-wage job growth and national defense.”