Doug Sinclair

Independent

Doug Sinclair is a spacecraft engineer, now retired after exiting from the bootstrapped company that he founded in 2001. He has been a mentor in CDL’s Space stream since 2018. Doug has won the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute (CASI) Alouette award for outstanding contribution to the advancement of Canadian space engineering three times over his career, most recently in 2024.

His company, Sinclair Interplanetary, designed and built the hardware that allowed small satellites (< 100 kg) to point precisely at targets on the ground or in space. This enabled the sort of ubiquitous reconnaissance imaging that we now take for granted, as well as space astronomy missions one thousand times smaller than the Hubble Space Telescope.
Sinclair Interplanetary was grown organically, without debt or equity investment, to a $10M/year business. In 2020 it was sold to Rocket Lab. This was arguably the first successful NewSpace exit, beginning a round of consolidation and acquisition in the industry. From 2020 to 2023, Doug worked for Rocket Lab as an engineering fellow. When the 20th launch of the Electron rocket failed in May 2021, he participated in the failure review process. He also contributed to NASA’s successful CAPSTONE mission to the moon, and to the design of the Globalstar G2.5 spacecraft that enable emergency messaging from the Apple iPhone 14.

Doug now divides his time between Toronto and Auckland, advising the next generation of emerging space companies.