Founder and CEO of Solstar Space Company
M. Brian Barnett is a serial entrepreneur with 30 years’ experience at NASA, KPMG, and in the commercial space industry. He is Founder and CEO of Solstar Space Co., the first internet service provider for people, things, and machines in space. Mr. Barnett began his career at NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center where he provided Space Shuttle payload integration services at the Payloads Project Office. He also provided astronaut crew training in the Mission Operations Laboratory for Spacelab missions. At Johnson Space Center, he worked in the Missions Operations Directorate, and later worked on JSC’s 1992 Strategic Plan. He also managed a contract to document all Space Shuttle operations processes as directed by Congress after the Challenger accident. Later, as a management consultant for KPMG’s Space and High Technology group, he wrote dozens of business plans and market assessments for commercial space companies. This is the group that very early and accurately, predicted that GPS applications would grow into the huge market it is today. Barnett wrote the initial business plan for the spaceport that eventually became Spaceport America. He began launching payloads out of Spaceport America beginning in 2011. On April 29th, 2018, Solstar demonstrated the first commercial wi-fi service in space and Tweet from space aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, using Barnett’s patent-pending technology.
He earned a B.S. in microbiology from the University of Oklahoma, a Masters in Administrative Science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and is a graduate of the International Space University. Solstar Space is his third commercial space start-up.
