Meet the Founders

Kathleen Morse, Ph.D., is the founder of Yosemite Space, where she leads the development and evaluation of advanced technologies for space applications. Her work spans space electronics, radiation effects, SmallSat systems, prototyping, and emerging concepts for autonomous space systems.

Kathleen holds a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University, where she subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in physics.

Before founding Yosemite Space, Kathleen spent seven years at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, developing and leading advanced technology programs in areas including radiation effects in electronics, space radiation shielding, optical metamaterials, advanced materials, and experimental test systems. Her work combined modeling and analysis with the development and testing of prototype hardware.

At Yosemite Space, Kathleen has led programs evaluating commercial-off-the-shelf electronics for space applications, including hardware exposed to the space environment aboard the International Space Station. She served as Principal Investigator for the NASA SBIR-funded Resilient Affordable CubeSat Processor (RACP) and led radiation testing and analysis supporting Team Miles in NASA’s Cube Quest competition. Yosemite Space subsequently developed CubeSTAR, a derivative of the RACP architecture designed to support mission autonomy.

More recently, Kathleen has been exploring autonomous self-assembly concepts for large space structures, with potential applications ranging from habitats and shelters to next-generation space telescopes. This work combines system concepts with hands-on design, fabrication, and testing using Yosemite Space’s in-house 3D printing and CNC capabilities.

Kathleen is an active member of the COSMIC consortium and participates in the broader community advancing in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing.

Mr. Zawodny serves as the lead software engineer for Yosemite Space.  His work experience includes developing software for the embedded Linux platform used on the Gumstix SoCs for their 9-month space experiment.  He developed radiation test monitoring software and hardware as well as baseline evaluation workloads used in radiation testing of SoCs and TI microcontrollers. This development included programming a variety of Atmel and TI microcontrollers as well as interfacing with external sensors and controls.

He developed the initial design for the Yosemite Space’s Resilient Affordable Cubesat Processor (RACP) and also worked on a simplified version which became CubeStar. The latter flew as part of a secondary payload on the Artemis 1 mission.

Mr. Zawodny has over 20 years of experience developing reliable, high performance software systems on Linux platforms.  He was a full-stack software engineer at Craigslist, working on database, search, and various infrastructure services.  During that time he has made technical contributions (patches) to several Open Source projects, including: Redis, MongoDB, the Sphinx search engine (now Manticore).

From December 1999 to June 2008, Jeremy worked in a variety of technical roles at Yahoo!  The bulk of that time was spent deploying, tuning, and evangelizing MySQL on both FreeBSD and Linux.  While working at Yahoo! Jeremy wrote the first edition of “High Performance MySQL” and presented about MySQL performance tuning and scaling at numerous technical conferences.  He also created mytop, a widely used real-time database performance monitoring tool.