Chris C. Kemp (born 1977) is an American entrepreneur who, along with Dr. Adam London,[1] founded Astra, a space technology firm based in California, in 2016.
[9] Kemp founded Netran, an online grocery shopping service for Kroger, while concurrently enrolled at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
[10] In 2002, after a personal attempt to book a beach house rental online, Kemp co-founded Escapia, a property management platform.
[13] Kemp joined NASA in 2006 as a director of strategic business development at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley where he helped forge a partnership with Google.
Launched in July 2010, OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing platform based on code from Kemp's team at NASA, in collaboration with Rackspace.
[31] In September 2013, Kemp became the Chief Strategy Officer and brought in veteran Gordon Stitt to lead Nebula as a public company.
[33][34] In October 2016, Kemp, together with Adam London, founded the startup Astra with the aim to develop a small-lift orbital rocket[35] that will "carry critical technology to improve life on Earth from space".
[38][39][40] Astra began building a 250,000 square feet (0.02 km2) factory at its headquarters in Alameda, California[41] and became the first space launch company to list in Nasdaq on July 1, 2021, at a valuation of $2.1 billion.