Joel C. Sercel

Sercel founded TransAstronautica Corporation in 2015, converging in it his studies and inventions, with the aim to build the necessary space infrastructure for transportation and resource mining in the solar system. Under Sercel's guidance, engineers at TranAstra are working on the following:

Sercel received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics from the University of Arizona in 1984. He received his PhD and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology with a thesis in plasma physics applied to space propulsion.

Sercel worked for fourteen years at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1983–1997), being awarded by NASA for many advancements in space propulsion technologies, systems and space mission project management. While at JPL, he worked on the ideation of the NSTAR ion propulsion system used on the Dawn spacecraft. He taught space engineering courses at Caltech (1993–2008). In the period 2002–2005, he was the Chief Systems Engineer of the (Transformational Satellite Communications System) project, a military satellite system commissioned by the US Air Force and worth twenty-two billion dollars. In 2016, he served in the National Academy of Science Air Force Studies Board on "The Role of Experimentation Campaigns in the Air Force Innovation Life Cycle" and in the NASA ARM Formulation Assessment and Support Team (FAST). In 2019, Sercel acted as Founding CTO of Momentus, a technological space company based in the Silicon Valley.

Joel C. Sercel (/ˈ sɛrsəl /; born 1960) is an American aerospace engineer. He is the inventor of Omnivore Thruster, a new concept of propulsion technology for in-space transportation, of Optical Mining, a technology for extracting raw materials from asteroids, of the Radiant Gas Dynamic method of lunar water harvesting, and of the Sun Flower Power Tower architecture for capturing and converting solar power into electricity to be used in polar lunar regions. As of July 2021, his work and studies have led to eight US patents and seventeen published applications. An asteroid, (46308) Joelsercel, was named after him.