Dan Berkenstock

Dan Berkenstock is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where his commercial and policy research focuses on the critical advancements needed to reduce the risk of conflict in space during a forthcoming period of rapid expansion. His work aims to ensure sustained American aerospace leadership well into the 21st century and provides space-related scholarship and policy recommendations through Hoover's Technology Policy Accelerator.

His technical research focuses on expanding convex and polynomial optimization techniques to identify globally optimal vehicle designs in aerodynamic shape optimization problems, with a focus on low-observability hypersonic vehicles.

From 2008 to 2017, Dan was the founding Chief Executive Officer, later Chief Product Officer, of Skybox Imaging. At Skybox, he oversaw the fundraising of more than $100M in venture capital, helped reset the benchmark for performance in the optical, small satellite arena, and led the company through a $500M acquisition by Google. The 21 Skybox satellites continue to operate as the world’s largest high-resolution commercial imaging constellation, providing timely imagery of major conflicts, which is often featured in major media outlets, and imagery used daily by defense and intelligence customers. For his work at Skybox, Dan was recognized in 2014 as the Satellite Executive of the Year and was previously an MIT Tech Review TR35 recipient. He continues to engage with the space start-up community by serving as an independent director on several boards of venture-backed aerospace start-ups and teaching aerospace entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering.

Dan completed his PhD at Stanford University in Aeronautics & Astronautics, where he also received a Masters of Science. He graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors of Science in Aerospace Engineering. During this time he completed four tours as a cooperative education student at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.