JapanTakeshi Hakamada
Takeshi Hakamada earned a BS in aerospace engineering from Nagoya University and an MS in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He began his career in management consulting, where he developed team-management skills and led cost-reduction projects, and from 2010 worked part-time to lead HAKUTO, the Japanese team competing in the Google Lunar XPRIZE. In 2013 he took over as HAKUTO's team lead and concurrently founded ispace, which he has built into a multinational commercial lunar-exploration company running the HAKUTO-R lander program. He took the company public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2023 and serves as CEO.