Bulent Altan

[4][5] As technical manager initially and later director he led the company's avionics, guidance, navigation, and control team and was instrumental to the Falcon 1 launch campaign on Omelek Island that resulted in the first privately funded, liquid-fueled spacecraft to reach orbit.

As VP of Satellite Mission Assurance he oversaw the development of the technology, the implementation of the business cases and markets until he eventually left SpaceX at the end of 2017.

[13] In 2021, Altan led the company to and through its initial public offering in the United States (Nasdaq: MYNA)[14] before, in 2023, he resigned from his CEO position to become part of the supervisory board of Mynaric.

[15] During his break from SpaceX between 2014 and 2016, Altan also worked for Airbus Defense and Space[2] and was a partner at TechFounders, a matchmaker between start-ups and established corporations in the ecosystem of the Technical University of Munich.

Unbeknownst to Altan, Elon Musk reached out to Google's co-founder, Larry Page, to facilitate a relocation for his wife to Los Angeles near SpaceX's headquarter in Hawthorne, California.