Ex-Hacker Launches Telescope Firm to Win the Light Race

From cybersecurity to space telescopes sounds like an unusual career change, but for Dan Roelker, it makes perfect sense.

The 48-year-old Pennsylvania native has lived several professional lives. He started as a hacker in the late 1990s, moved into network security at a startup that sold for $2.7 billion, then became one of the youngest program managers at DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm. There, he led Plan X, one of the military's first public offensive cyberwarfare programs.

After leaving government work in 2014, Roelker spent a year working on League of Legends before landing at SpaceX as head of software development. He helped rebuild the Falcon 9 rocket after a catastrophic failure and pushed the boundaries of what software could do in space.

Now he's launched his own company called Observable Space, founded in 2025. His mission sounds simple but ambitious: collect more light than anyone else.

"If you can control light, you can control space," Roelker explained from his perch in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. "The new space race is going to be on the ground."

He's not wrong about light becoming critical. Telescopes track thousands of satellites to prevent collisions. Laser technology beams massive amounts of data from orbit. Space-based data centers are becoming reality. All of it depends on harnessing light.

Observable Space builds telescopes and advanced optics, with Roelker writing the software that powers them. It's a combination of his decades in software engineering with humanity's oldest tool for understanding the cosmos.

Why This Inspires

Roelker's journey shows how skills transfer in unexpected ways. The same thinking that helped him dominate cyber battlespace now helps him capture photons from satellites and stars. His background in network security translates perfectly to managing the data flowing from space.

What makes his story compelling isn't just the career pivots. It's that someone from a working-class background, whose family questioned his math and philosophy degree, kept reinventing himself. He could have stayed comfortable at Johns Hopkins with a stable retirement plan, but he chased adventure instead.

From gaming to rockets to telescopes, Roelker keeps finding new frontiers. His latest bet is that whoever wins the race to collect light will shape the future of spaceflight.