Jeffrey Montes Founding Partner
Jeffrey’s career is characterized by the transfer of conceptual rigor, creative range, and architectural practice to the aerospace context and vice versa.
Jeffrey held the first Space Architect role in commercial aerospace when he started as Senior Space Architect at Blue Origin. As Blue’s first in-house spacecraft designer at the cusp of an era in which aerospace is beginning to adopt Design methods, Jeffrey learned how to champion a humane design vision onto classically 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 pilot interface.
Prior to Blue, Jeffrey developed award-winning designs such as Mars Ice House. His design for Marsha, completed as Head of Space Architecture & Research at AI SpaceFactory, was awarded >$600,000 by NASA 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, previously awarded to Raspberry Pi and Tesla Roadster. His career began in New York City where he worked as designer and consulting specialist on 3D-printed grid shell structures and detailed building envelope design.
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.