Previously, he developed spacecraft avionics and ground control systems at Planetary Resources. In 2012, Ian created Asterank, a collection of computational tools and visualizations used to analyze asteroids and evaluate potential missions, acquired by Planetary Resources in 2013. Ian open-sourced the entire Asterank and other related work on space analysis with the goal of making aerospace more open to software engineers and hackers. Prior to working in space, Ian was a lead engineer at a startup acquired by Google. He holds a degree in computer science from Dartmouth College.