Ryan McLinko is CTO and Co-Founder of Astranis, which is building small, low-cost, Geostationary, telecommunications satellites to bring the rest of the world online. Astranis was started in 2015, launched a demo satellite in 2018, launched its first commercial spacecraft in 2023, and launched four more spacecraft at the end of 2024, which will be entering service soon to provide service to the Philippines and North America mobility applications. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees and Board of Advisors for SEDS-USA.

Prior to this, he was a Spacecraft Engineer and Mechanical/Electrical Teams Lead at Planet Labs, where he designed and built a fleet of cubesats that image the entire planet's surface every day, and a Systems Engineer at Sierra Nevada Corporation, where he developed flight control systems for the Dream Chaser vehicle. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Aerospace Engineering. His Master’s thesis was entitled “Structural Design of Low Cost, Rapid Development Satellites.”