Unreasonable Fellows
Yuya Nakamura
President and CEO at Axelspace
Yuya is an Unreasonable Fellow. Yuya was part of Unreasonable Impact Asia Pacific 2017.
Yuya Nakamura is the president and CEO of Axelspace, a microsatellite startup based in Tokyo. He earned Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from University of Tokyo in 2007. While he belonged to Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory (ISSL) at the university, he was involved in 3 nanosatellite projects, including the world's first successful CubeSat (standardized nanosatellite of 10cm-cubic and 1kg) project. The CubeSat was launched in 2003 and amazingly it is still working in orbit after 18 years since launch. Based on this experience, he founded Axelspace in 2008 with his colleagues at the University of Tokyo and Tokyo Institute of Technology, and started the private microsatellite project for Weathernews – the world’s largest weather information company. As a company leader, he has successfully led more than 5 microsatellite projects so far, including the satellite for JAXA (Japanese space agency). In 2015 he inaugurated a new project named AxelGlobe, where the constellation of dozens of microsatellites in orbit will monitor the whole world almost on a daily basis. The big data of our planet is to be analyzed to provide business intelligence to various industries such as agriculture, forestry, mapping and urban planning. The constellation is scheduled to be complete by 2023.