The Uzbek who conquered space together with Elon Musk

The CEO of Exolaunch, 42-year-old Dmitry Bogdanov, was born in Uzbekistan. As a student, he began working as an associate professor at the Department of Space Technologies.

In 2011, he registered his company Exolaunch GmbH. The customer was the Berlin and Dresden Technical Universities, for which it was necessary to launch three small satellites into space to measure oxygen and test university developments.

The debut flight turned out to be very profitable for him - the starting price for German universities was $70,000, of which about 7% was accounted for by the Exolaunch commission. According to Bogdanov, until 2016, the company had five to seven customers, and revenue was less than $1 million. Since 2017, the number of buyers has grown to 20-30 companies, and revenue has exceeded $10 million. Exolaunch started working with SpaceX in 2020.

Bogdanov notes that the net profit of the entire Exolaunch Company in 2020 amounted to about 3 million euros. According to him, the revenue reached tens of millions of euros. He also stressed that the company now has more than 50 clients, including Spire Global, NanoAvionics, Satellogic, Kepler Communications and others.