The team.

Joseph began building lunar spacecraft in 2016 under JPL supervision while at university, where he owned the Telemetry, Tracking & Command (TT&C) subsystem for a CubeSat mission to study the efficacy of lunar regolith as radiation shielding. After graduating, he joined Collins Aerospace and owned SATCOM specifications and qualification test campaigns for military helicopter avionics while holding a Secret clearance. At Blue Origin, he started in Advanced Development Programs, where he supported C&DH testing for Blue Ring and then BE-4 environmental qualification. When the company won NASA's Human Landing System contract, he moved to the Lunar Permanence business unit as Responsible Engineer for avionics hardware-in-the-loop test assets at Johnson Space Center.

Before Semaphore, Joseph served as a rotating Flight Director at Amazon Leo while the constellation scaled from two protoflight satellites to hundreds of production satellites. In that role, he directed distributed flight control teams and kept the satellites in safe custody from pre-launch checks through demise. Alongside that work, he conceived and then built Amazon Leo's mission operations data and analytics platform. He holds a BS in Software Engineering from Auburn University.

Nick spent more than eight years at Amazon, where he built inference systems for Maps and Connected Vehicle in the Last Mile organization. At Project Kuiper, he led the Constellation Management & Space Safety team and built its system from the ground up, including ephemeris generation, management, and vending. The team did the safety-critical work of keeping Kuiper’s satellites clear of other spacecraft and debris. That meant screening for conjunctions, planning collision-avoidance maneuvers, and coordinating with the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron and other operators. He then left Amazon to start Zenith Space, which was building next-generation satellite ground software, from contact scheduling to command and control.

Nick later returned to Kuiper, now Amazon Leo, to transform its mission-critical operations. A surprisingly manual process had carried the constellation to its first couple hundred satellites, but Amazon Leo is now the third-largest in orbit. He worked to reduce the cognitive load on the people flying the satellites and to make the correct action the easiest one to take across the fleet. He holds BS degrees in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Michigan.