We’ve spent the past two decades making the impossible, possible
Our team is made up of seasoned leaders and entrepreneurs from the worlds of aerospace, nuclear, and tech.
Our team
Ben Kellie
CEOBen joined SpaceX in early 2012 as a Responsible Engineer helping to design, build, test, and operate the Vandenberg SLC-4E West Coast launch site. He served as Lead Engineer for the inaugural flight preparing the launch vehicle on the pad and leading the Red Team with first on / last off responsibility.
From there, he pivoted to Recovery and helped lead the development of the landing barges from first steel in the shipyard, where he ran the build team, through the first landing missions at sea where he served as Deck Boss. He led through multiple iterations of the east and west coast landing barges.
He then founded “The Launch Company” which developed launch & test sites for New Space rocket companies where the team bootstrapped hardware to orbit. He successfully sold Launch Co. to Voyager Space in 2021.
Paul Keutelian
CTOPaul is an experienced aerospace and nuclear systems engineer and entrepreneur with over 13 years of experience in high-stakes production hardware development.
He was an early SpaceX Responsible Engineer at Vandenberg with ownership over four high-energy compressible, incompressible, and hazardous fluid systems at the plant scale.
He then served as a lead control room operator and trainer and as a point engineer on a multi-billion-dollar launch program, where he navigated highly regulated, precision-driven environments with government customers.
He was previously the technical co-founder and COO of Radiant Industries, where he led the development of the world’s first portable 1.2 MWe microreactor.
Leigh D’Angelo
Chief Marketing OfficerLeigh has led work across advanced energy and infrastructure, spanning journalism, communications, policy, and commercialization in highly regulated environments.
She began her career as an investigative television reporter before leading communications and digital modernization efforts for NASA, and later holding senior marketing and communications roles at advanced energy companies deploying novel hydrogen and carbon management technologies.
Her work focuses on ensuring energy solutions are communicated with technical precision and accountability, aligned with real-world deployment expectations for systems that will last for decades.
Jordan Alves
Senior Deployment EngineerJordan Alves leads engineering and development efforts for the company's physical infrastructure. Jordan brings extensive experience managing full project lifecycles for mission-critical environments across advanced manufacturing, heavy industrial, and laboratory sectors.
Over the past decade, he has delivered complex infrastructure projects for some of the most technically demanding programs in the world — including manufacturing and launch site facilities for SpaceX and Relativity Space, infrastructure upgrades at SLAC National Laboratory, and facility development for fusion energy startup Pacific Fusion.
Chris Newton
Chief EngineerChris brings two decades of hands-on engineering, operations, and leadership experience across the aerospace, energy, and infrastructure sectors.
He has held VP roles at Gravitics and ABL Space Systems, as well as served in senior technical leadership roles at Virgin Orbit, Relativity Space, and SpaceX.
At the latter, he worked on everything from launch to recovery to the first developed hardware for Starship.
He is also a published author on solar thermal energy systems and holds patents for solar water purification technologies and spinal surgical hardware.
Sibi Murugesan
HEad of special projectsSibi Murugesan joins Applied Atomics as Head of Special Projects, bringing a track record built at the intersection of strategy, execution, and early-stage company building.
He has served as the first non-founder hire three times at early-stage companies in regulated sectors and held Chief of Staff roles at two ventures — operating as a direct extension of the founding CEO across strategy, operations, and growth.
Sibi has been part of founding teams that raised significant venture capital across multiple rounds, and has held growth and GTM roles at Slack, Techstars, and Best Buy, consistently reporting to the C-Suite. He brings the operational range to move between high-level strategy and hands-on execution in environments where both matter.
