Former Hacker Now Aims to Collect All the Light
▼ Summary
– Dan Roelker, from an overlook in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, discussed his belief that controlling light is a race to dominate space.
– Roelker’s career path includes roles as a hacker, video game coder, SpaceX software head, crypto/NFT work, and now building telescopes and optics.
– Humans have long used light from stars for understanding the Universe and navigation, and now track satellites and use laser light for data transmission.
– Roelker cofounded Observable Space in 2025 to harness light, driven by the idea that the new space race will be fought on the ground.
– Roelker came from a working-class background and studied mathematics and philosophy in college, surprising his family.
From a scenic overlook in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Dan Roelker took in the sweeping green expanse of the Shenandoah Valley. As the spring afternoon melted into evening, the Sun drifted lazily across the sky, spilling light in every direction. Sipping rye whiskey from the local Catoctin Creek distillery, Roelker, now 48, found himself in a reflective mood, eager to discuss one of his lifelong fascinations: light.
“If you can control light, you can control space,” he said. “So it’s basically a race for who is collecting the most light.”
And Roelker is very much in that race. His career path has been anything but conventional. It began with hacking, moved to video game coding, then to leading software development at SpaceX, followed by ventures into crypto and NFTs. Now, his focus has turned to building telescopes and advanced optics, while writing the software that brings them to life.
Humans have always used light from distant stars and galaxies to understand the Universe, Roelker explained. Over time, we built telescopes to peer deeper into the cosmos and used starlight for navigation as we ventured into space. More recently, telescopes have tracked the growing swarm of satellites orbiting Earth to prevent collisions. And today, engineers are using laser light to dramatically boost the data transmitted from space, a technology made even more urgent by the rise of orbital data centers.
“The new space race is going to be on the ground,” Roelker said. The winners, he believes, will be those who can harness light in powerful, transformative ways.
To that end, Roelker cofounded Observable Space in 2025. He admits it’s hard to explain how he ended up here. His parents never attended college. His father died when Roelker was young, and his mother ran a school lunch program. When he left a working-class upbringing in small-town Pennsylvania to study at a private university in Maryland, his family was stunned that he chose to major in mathematics and philosophy.
(Source: Ars Technica)