About
Don Pedersen
League City, TX · Software since 1989
I'm a technical executive and lifelong software builder. By day I run the Flight Software and Systems Integration Lab for Starlab — a commercial successor to the ISS — at Cimarron Software Services. By night (and the other night, and most weekends) I'm Founder & CTO of DartNode, an AI-powered infrastructure and business platform serving thousands of clients.
Across thirty years and a dozen programs I've shipped flight software to the Moon and the ISS, architected the avionics for NASA's next-generation space suit, built a NASA Software-of-the-Year scheduling system still in daily use, and stood up an autonomous AI-driven operations platform for a globally distributed network.
I like cradle-to-grave ownership: proposal, architecture, build, certification, and the long quiet years of sustaining the thing.
In 2025 I co-founded ip.space, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing open standard protocols to space systems. I think the next decade of space infrastructure ought to look more like the internet and less like a one-off vendor stack.
Selected programs
RAC — Lunar Surface Payload
Blue Ghost CLPS lander · 2020–2024PI & PM
Regolith Adherence Characterization payload. Motor control, dual-computer flight software, photo capture, and full command & data handling for lunar surface operations.
xEVAS — Next-Gen Space Suit
US Patent 12,047,196Principal Architect · Power, Comms, Avionics & Informatics
Dual rad-hard processor architecture with multiple boot methods for a life-critical system. Power, battery, and communications architecture for ISS and the lunar terrain vehicle.
DartNode — AI Infrastructure Platform
2014–present · Owns AS399646Founder & CTO
Hybrid on-prem + Claude API inference, autonomous server-management agent, MCP-based tool orchestration, real-time POP monitoring, full billing/CRM/scheduling stack — all in-house.
