Hayden A Burgoyne

Work and Research Experience

Sophia Space

October 2025–Present. Pasadena, CA

Systems Engineering Consultant

• Early system architecture design for space-based edge compute and orbital data centers. Defining roadmap for technology development, commercial partnerships, and government engagement with co-founders.

UsFolks.ai

June 2025–Present (Sabbatical from TransAstra). Los Angeles, CA

Founder

• Built multiple AI-driven MVPs for personalized political engagement and better constituent representation using LLMs, RAG pipelines, and statistical modeling (“Perplexity for Polling”). Conducted customer discovery interviews with local officials, campaigns, and policy groups. Designed and implemented full web platforms, as well as LLM fine-tuning and synthetic polling data pipelines.
• Participated in 50 Years VC’s 5050 Founders Program and Menlo Ventures’ Menlo Labs Fellowship, gaining experience in fundraising, GTM definition, and startup execution.

TransAstra

March 2022 to October 2025. Pacoima, CA

TransAstra is a seed-stage YC company (S21) developing the technologies to find and capture asteroids, then extract their resources to build in-space infrastructure.

Director of Engineering

• Engineering manager for all of TransAstra's projects including:
  • Oversaw ~15 full-time engineers developing robotic telescope hardware and inflatable capture bags for space debris mitigation and asteroid capture. Three robotic compound telescope systems fielded and delivering data to Space Force customers ahead of schedule. Capture Bag demonstration unit flown on the International Space Station in September 2025.
  • Product manager for telescope automation software used nightly on TransAstra's remote telescope observatories for detecting asteroids and spacecraft traffic management. First author on US Patent 12198356: Optimized matched filter tracking of space objects. Also uplinked these detection algorithms to operational CubeSat in Low-Earth Orbit, demonstrating observations of classified Chinese spacecraft in Geosynchronous Orbit using a small CubeSat telescope.
• Wrote winning technical proposals for Small Business Innovative Research Grants from NASA and the Space Force totaling approximately $8.4M of non-dilutive funding. (Phase 2s: link, link, link, link, link, TACFI: link)
• Began formal sabbatical end of June 2025 to pursue personal startup ideas while maintaining role as part-time consultant

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory