Julian
CEO & Co-founder, Tumbleweed
Julian Rothenbuchner is co-founder and CEO of Tumbleweed.
Julian Rothenbuchner is co-founder and CEO of Tumbleweed, which makes microgravity accessible to research and industry. He has been building space systems since school. At sixteen he co-founded Team Tumbleweed, a wind-driven Mars rover project that won a space competition and European Space Agency funding — making him, at nineteen, the youngest person to receive it — and grew it into a research organisation of more than 100 people across four continents. That organisation now operates separately from the company. He is an EWOR fellow, and studied aerospace engineering at TU Delft.
Company Profile
Tumbleweed
Tumbleweed makes microgravity accessible to research and industry. Its Pods are modular, pre-certified payload containers: rather than certifying every component individually, each Pod is pre-certified for spaceflight, meeting safety requirements independent of content, thereby absorbing the compliance burden that has kept orbit out of reach of most laboratories. Each Pod also supplies power, data and temperature control. Pods fly on Oasis, the company’s own free-flying orbital platform, which hosts them, runs the mission and returns results to Earth. The effect is to abstract away space logistics to a gravity-off switch, opening microgravity research and manufacturing to pharmaceutical, semiconductor and materials teams, without requiring them to become space companies. Its first mission, Oasis Alpha, flew payloads for four customers and proved the approach makes shipping hardware to space substantially cheaper and faster.
