Our specialty is Space Stations for the commercial era, founded on pioneering work at Blue Origin and Tycho Space. We bring the rigors of designing for spaceflight to all of our work.
Jeffrey Montes Founding Partner
Jeffrey’s career is characterized by the transfer of conceptual rigor, creative range, and architectural know-how to the aerospace context and vice versa.
Jeffrey held the first “Space Architect” role in the Space industry when he started as Senior Space Architect at Blue Origin. Joining at the cusp of the industry’s adoption of Design methods, Jeffrey learned how to champion a humane design vision onto over-constrained engineering problems. He helped win the $170M NASA contract to design Orbital Reef, a successor to the aging International Space Station. He led the team responsible for the design of spacecraft and for how those environments shape the astronaut experience. This included work on lunar habitats and infrastructure, hybrid surface mobility systems, and the Artemis lunar lander interior and flight deck.
Prior to Blue, Jeffrey developed genre-defining Mars habitat designs, including Marsha, which was awarded a NASA grand prize of >$600,000 for its innovation and for the team’s successful prototype using large-scale semi-autonomous 3D-printing. It also won the prestigious $100,000 Index Award.
Jeffrey holds a M.Arch from Columbia University and B.S. in Architecture with a minor in Philosophy from Northeastern University. He is a fellow at Open Lunar Foundation.
Will Root
Founding Partner
Will has spent over a decade working in factory-built prefab architecture system design. His work centers on the design of scalable systems that reconcile technical constraints with spatial utility, and on developing frameworks that enable complex environments to emerge from repeatable components.
Will is the founder of Tycho Space, a space start-up developing expandable space station technologies and architectures for large-scale orbital habitats. His current work explores how deployable pressure vessels, prefab modular systems, and industrial scale might enable the construction of large-scale space colonies, translating architectural and manufacturing principles into viable pathways for long-term habitation beyond Earth.
Prior to Tycho Space, he spent over a decade at prefab construction startups including Katerra, Sustainable Living Innovations, and LIT Homes, where he led the development of modular building platforms, mass-produced architectural products, prefabricated components, and deployment strategies for urban and emergency housing. His work spanned industrial design, product development, manufacturing integration, and the standardization of building systems across diverse regulatory environments.
Will holds a degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY with a minor in Sustainable Studies.
+ The Assumptions Lab
Our cross-disciplinary advisory panel
Different Systems pairs its earned expertise with humility & a belief in changing information. We maintain a constellation of experts spanning the domains and subsystems of spaceflight. This help us pressure-test assumptions, allowing us to make durable recommendations that our clients can trust.
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