The Story of CisLunar Industries: Turning Space Junk into the Steel Mills of Tomorrow

Gary Calnan tried to become an astronaut the traditional way. He enrolled at the Air Force Academy, spent a couple years there, then decided it wasn’t for him. Most people would have moved on to something safer, something more conventional. Gary went to the International Space University instead.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Gary shared the path that led him from that decision to founding CisLunar Industries, a company that wants to become the steel mills of space by processing metal debris orbiting Earth. It’s a story about recognizing opportunities in problems, surviving when your market is a decade away, and building two companies at once.

The Genesis: Why Space Debris?

Gary came to space entrepreneurship without an engineering background. “I don’t have an engineering background. I come as an entrepreneur and a business person,” he explains. That outsider perspective led him to see gaps others missed.

At the International Space University, Gary and his team analyzed the emerging space economy. They noticed companies doing extraction and manufacturing, “but not really anyone who was working on processing materials.”

Someone needed to be the steel mills of this new industrial economy. Then Gary learned about space debris.

The numbers are staggering: over 10,000 objects orbit Earth right now—old satellites, spent rocket stages. Within ten years, that could explode to 100,000 satellites. Every collision creates millions of pieces of debris moving at extreme velocities.

That’s when Gary saw the opportunity: “There’s, you know, millions of kilograms of materials out there that’s already refined metals, doesn’t have to be extracted from virgin ore that’s in an asteroid or on the moon. Why not figure out how to process that material and use it as a resource?”

The vision: turn the most expensive cleanup problem in space into a mining opportunity. “We take that debris that is currently a very expensive, somewhat intractable cleanup problem and turn it into a potential mining opportunity so that the economics of it actually drive the cleanup itself.”

The Luxembourg Detour

CisLunar started in Luxembourg in 2017 because the country was pursuing a space resources initiative. But Gary watched the United States shift its focus. “I really seen the US government and NASA and the policy world really move towards wanting to tackle space debris as a serious problem.” CisLunar eventually moved operations to the United States.

The Breakthrough Nobody Planned

In 2021, CisLunar won their first NASA SBIR contract to develop a metal recycling foundry. The technology used electromagnetic induction to heat and control metal without physical contact. They needed a power converter, but everything available was “big and expensive and not really designed or ever would be designed to go to space.”

So they built their own. Then they hired a brilliant electronics engineer who miniaturized it from toaster-oven size to the size of a deck of cards.

A collaborator at Colorado State University looked at it and said: “You know what, guys? This thing looks a lot like a power processing unit for propulsion and for other things, too, that people need in space.”

That moment changed everything. “Everything in space, all the satellites you see, except for when you light the rocket with chemical propulsion to send it somewhere, everything else is electrical,” Gary realized. Every satellite, every space system needs power conversion. They’d accidentally built a product with applications across the entire industry.

CisLunar recently flew their power converter on a suborbital flight with Think Orbital. The successful demonstration proved the technology works and opened commercial opportunities Gary never imagined when he first set out to recycle space debris.

Surviving the Valley of Death

Here’s the hard truth: the timeline doesn’t match venture capital expectations. “The commercial time horizon was quite distant, like probably a decade out for metals and materials to be really a big commercial market in space,” Gary admits.

“One of the big challenges we’ve had with your typical investor, VC investor, is that our time horizon to get to commercial viability for metal processing is not your typical five to seven years. And that just doesn’t fit with the turnaround time that most VCs typically say they need.”

CisLunar didn’t close their first VC investment until Q1 of this year. How did they survive? Government contracts provided non-dilutive funding. Contract engineering deals brought in cash. The power converter business created near-term revenue.

“We even took contract engineering deals with some customers who were aligned with us strategically,” Gary shares. “That allowed us to bring cash in the door and even hire people new to the company even though we couldn’t raise money.”

Building on the Frontier

For Gary, one of space industry’s biggest draws is the community. “The whole community, really, especially these days, with all the new stuff that’s happening. You’re really out there on the frontier creating the future,” he says. “We imagine what we want to see become possible. We see the science fiction that we’ve all grown up with and want to make it reality.”

Gary still believes he has a better than 75% chance of going to space in his lifetime—not as an Air Force Academy graduate, but as an entrepreneur helping build the infrastructure that makes space accessible.

The Vision: Steel Mills in Space

Today, CisLunar employs 15 people. In three to five years, Gary projects 50-70 employees. The power converter business will drive commercial growth while government contracts fund metal processing development.

But the real vision extends much further. Gary wants CisLunar to “help open up the solar system for humanity.” That means becoming the foundational infrastructure provider for materials processing in cislunar space.

“Our vision is to make that a reality and to supply the industry with materials and end of life solutions and to create, to be able to take space debris cleanup and turn it into an economic opportunity instead of something that’s just a cleanup exercise,” Gary explains. “And to really enable the industry to grow and develop into a solar system wide economy.”

It’s audacious. But CisLunar has something most moonshot companies don’t: a path that doesn’t require miracles, just building the right things in the right order and staying alive long enough for the future to arrive.

Sometimes the best way to reach the stars is to start by cleaning up the mess we’ve already made there.