When Yuk Chi Chan set out to build Charter Space in late 2021, it was after a long stretch of pain.
As a mission manager at a satellite bus startup, he coordinated the company’s first demonstration mission — and he had to do it all with critical data scattered across Microsoft Excel.
In addition to managing the internal engineering operations, Chan, a former space lawyer, had to essentially repackage the same critical engineering and program data for different external audiences.
“It was all the same data. It was all about the same physical object,” he told TechCrunch. “I was like, this is nuts … Why shouldn’t I be able to have some sort of unified interface, or some sort of unified data model, that actually represents this thing correctly to whoever’s looking at it?”
That spurred him to found Charter. The company is not so much a dev tool for aerospace engineers (though it’s used that way), as it is a fintech company for space, Chan described. The software captures manufacturing and test data directly from the source, and this dataset then feeds an underwriting interface that ties directly in with the six largest insurance carriers in the market.
Charter Space is a Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, which runs this week in San Francisco.
The goal is faster, cheaper, and more reliable risk evaluation for spacecraft insurance, and eventually to power new forms of credit and nondilutive funding for space companies looking outside venture capital and the public markets.
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