Jake Teufert

Jake Teufert has over 12 years of professional experience in the aerospace industry. Jake began their career in 2007 as a Research Assistant at the Florida Institute of Technology, where they programmed in-house Gibbs free energy minimization combustion code and created a frozen flow and shifting equilibrium rocket nozzle model. In 2008, they joined United Space Alliance as a Pyrotechnic Systems Engineer, where they managed lot acceptance and service life extension for Shuttle SRB pyrotechnics, ordnance, and separation rocket motors. In 2011, they became a Propulsion Engineer (Contractor) at Aerojet Rocketdyne, where they supported development and qualification testing of MR-104H hydrazine monopropellant engine, as well as upgrades to R-42 hypergolic engine and conceptual design work for Green Propellant Infusion Mission (GPIM). In 2012, they joined Orbital ATK as a Propulsion Engineer, where they executed acceptance and service life extension testing of solid rocket motors and pyrotechnic hardware for the Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD) program, and evaluated flight data and ballistics performance for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd stage motors of GMD test flights. In 2014, they became Lead Propulsion Engineer at Masten Space Systems, where they designed and fired a 25,000 lbf LNG/LOX pressure-fed engine built entirely using additive manufacturing, and executed redesign of Masten Scimitar to increase thrust by 20% and allow operation at higher specific impulse operating point with reformulated, higher flame temperature fuel. In 2017, they Co-Founded and became Chief Engineer at Tesseract. Most recently, in 2020, they joined Benchmark Space Systems as Chief Engineer.

Jake Teufert attended Y Combinator in 2017 for the S17 Batch. From 2013 to 2014, they obtained a Master of Science (M.S.) in Space Systems from the Florida Institute of Technology. Jake also obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Aerospace Engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology between 2004 to 2007.