First Stage
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Engineers from Starship’s first stage, now building yours.

First Stage exists because the hardest part of hardware is rarely the engineering question on the whiteboard. It is everything required to turn that answer into a part, at rate, on a schedule someone is counting on.

The team

Today First Stage works with hardware startups across aerospace, clean energy, automotive and AI, most of them at the stage where the product exists but the operation around it does not yet.

Maral Abbasinik, Co-Founder of First Stage

Co-Founder

Maral Abbasinik

LinkedIn

Maral Abbasinik helps companies figure out how to build, not just what to build. She spent six and a half years at SpaceX working on Falcon, Dragon and Starship, where she took Starship’s heatshield from a napkin sketch to full production in under ten months and later led the technical program for the Human Landing System. She then went to K2 Space to build a satellite startup’s manufacturing from the ground up.

She started First Stage to bring that experience to more teams, and she’s already working with startups in aerospace, clean energy, manufacturing and AI. She knows where hardware companies tend to break as they grow, and she loves helping teams turn a product vision into an operation that runs, so they can stop firefighting and actually build.

Logan Hicks, Co-Founder of First Stage

Co-Founder

Logan Hicks

LinkedIn

Logan brings deep experience from SpaceX and the industrial sector, where he has worked on structures, mechanisms, thermal hardware, controls, and energy systems. Over his years at SpaceX, he led development campaigns on Crew Dragon, recovered spacecraft from the ocean, and spearheaded Raptor heat shield design, and developed landing legs and solar panels for Starship’s lunar lander. Along the way he learned how to design hardware that holds up under the harshest loads, operates flawlessly on orbit, and still gets built and tested on schedule. After SpaceX, Logan built the product engineering team at Karman Industries from the ground up: responsible for mechanical, fluids, electrical, and controls engineering. Logan has designed a broad range of hardware and built every piece of it with his own hands. This depth of experience and desire to build hardware is now applied to aerospace, thermal handling, industrial, and energy applications.

At First Stage Logan supports engineering process development, design, analysis and test operations, making sure the hardware is right before it is built and proven before it ships.