This former hacker saw the light—and now wants to collect all of it - Ars Technica
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BLUEMONT, Va.—From an overlook in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Dan Roelker gazed across the green splendor of the Shenandoah Valley. With the pleasant spring afternoon drawing toward evening, the Sun lazily crossed the sky, casting light all around.
The pleasing environs had put Roelker, who was drinking rye whiskey procured from a local distillery called Catoctin Creek, in an expansive mood to talk about one of his favorite subjects: light.
“If you can control light, you can control space,” he said. “So it’s basically a race for who is collecting the most light.”
And Roelker, now 48 years old, finds himself firmly in a race to collect the most light. He has followed an improbable career path, moving from hacker to video game coder to head of software development at SpaceX, then into crypto and NFTs, and now, of all things, to building telescopes and advanced optics while writing the software that brings them to life.
As he sipped whiskey, Roelker shared his vision for the future of spaceflight. Since the dawn of our existence, humans have observed light from distant stars and galaxies to make sense of the Universe. Later, we devised telescopes for deeper observations of the heavens, and as we took to the stars, we used their light for navigation.
More recently, our telescopes have carefully tracked the movement of a growing number of satellites buzzing around the planet to ensure they avoid collisions. And now, engineers have harnessed laser light to dramatically increase the amount of data that can be beamed down from space, a technology all the more urgent due to the advent of orbital data centers.
“The new space race is going to be on the ground,” Roelker said. And the winners, he believes, will be those who can harness the light in powerful new ways.
Engaging in cyberwarfare
To control the light, Roelker cofounded a company in 2025 called Observable Space. He struggled to explain how he wound up here. His parents didn’t go to college. His dad died when Roelker was fairly young. His mom cooked school lunches. When Roelker left this working-class life in small-town Pennsylvania to attend a private university in Maryland, his family was stunned when he said he would study mathematics and philosophy.
“My family was like, ‘What are you going to do with that? How are you going to be able to build a house with that?’” he recalled.
But beyond his formal classes, what intrigued Roelker most were computers, particularly hacking. This was the late 1990s, and he had grown up with books like The Anarchist Cookbook and realized the power of computers and the growing influence of the Internet on society.
Even before graduating, he took a research job at the nearby Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He could envision a four-decade career stretching out before him, providing the kind of financial stability he had not enjoyed growing up, a comfortable retirement with a 403(b) plan, and more. But this wasn’t enough. He sought adventure and excitement and, amid the dot-com boom, a chance at greater riches.
So he left academia for the private industry, working as a software engineer at a small networking company before becoming a founding developer at Sourcefire in May 2002, a startup focused on network security. It would later be acquired by Cisco for $2.7 billion. Seeking to move from cyber defense to offense, he took on cyberwarfare jobs at companies later acquired by BAE Systems and Raytheon. These activities brought Roelker to the attention of the US government.
In early 2011, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recruited him to manage its cyberwarfare initiatives. In his early 30s, he was one of the agency’s youngest-ever program managers. While working for the government, Roelker’s biggest project was called Plan X, which in military parlance sought to dominate the cyber “battlespace.” For years, the US Department of Defense had spoken about defending itself in cyberspace, but now, for the first time, it was talking about offensive capabilities. Roelker helped develop the tools to automate the execution of cyberattacks.
“It was a pretty big deal because it was one of the first public acknowledgements that the military was engaging in offensive cyberwarfare,” Roelker said.
After three years at DARPA and more than a decade in cyberspace and hacking, Roelker was ready for a reset.
Space is the place?
At the beginning of 2014, Roelker left DARPA to...