Jaret Matthews

Jaret B. Matthews is an aerospace engineer and CEO of Astrolab (Venturi Astrolab, Inc.), which he founded in January, 2020. Astrolab is creating commercial planetary surface mobility vehicles for the Moon and Mars and was awarded a contract to develop NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle in 2024. Astrolab will send their first rover to the Moon in 2025 on the Astrobotic Griffin 1 mission. Prior to Astrolab, Matthews spent seven years at Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) as manager of the Dragon Spacecraft Mechanisms development team, supporting the NASA Commercial Crew Program and the NASA Commercial Resupply Services Program. Jaret spent the first decade of his career at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the Robotic Vehicles Group. At JPL, Matthews led the development of novel mobility and manipulation systems such as the ATHLETE lunar rover, the Axel extreme terrain rover, the MoonRise robotic arm, and a variety of subsurface and aerial mobility platforms. Matthews has spent significant time testing rovers in planetary analog field sites worldwide, including Antarctica, Arctic Canada (two times via the NASA Haughton Mars Project), Alaska, Hawaii (at PISCES), Iceland, and dozens of other analog locations. Matthews participated in four prior D-RATS campaigns (Black Point 2009 and 2010, Moses Lake 2008, Meteor Crater 2006).