Brian Barnett, president/CEO and founder, Solstar

Albuquerque Business First: Where are you from and what’s your educational background? 

Barnett: I’m from the Southwest U.S., from Oklahoma and Colorado. …I have a science undergraduate degree from the University of Oklahoma in microbiology. Then I have a master’s in business from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and [completed] post-graduate studies at the International Space University … in France.

After that experience, what was your first job in the industry? I joined NASA. That was my first professional job. I was developing payloads to fly onto the space shuttle and worked in astronaut crew training. I was training to be a crew interface coordinator, which is the person on the ground who interacts with the astronauts while they’re in the space station.

What inspired you to be in the aerospace industry? Like a lot of people my age, my generation, we got to see the Apollo launches and landings when they went to the moon. … We were really inspired by space travel, and we all wanted to be astronauts. I was just interested in astronomy early on, too, and my dad bought me a telescope, and so just all those things together, and then somehow, I just got so interested in space exploration.

What would you say is your biggest accomplishment so far? Probably Wi-Fi in space, … Because now that equipment’s going to be at the Smithsonian Museum [on] permanent display, like starting as early as next year at the [National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C]. That that was so hard, and it worked, and it was excruciating, after the rocket took off and there were some issues. They rebooted everything on board, [and] had to get it to work as it was flying up, and then we only had like three minutes while we were in space to get the tweet up. 

What hobbies do you enjoy? I’m a classically trained rock drummer, so I still play. I’m starting to get known as the space drummer, because I want to be the first drummer in space. We had a short film [called] Space Drummer, and that was in the Santa Fe Film Festival this year. It was just a short film [featuring] me playing [a] drum song. But I’ve started to perform around, to get gigs as the Space Drummer and I’ve been in a lot of rock bands over the years… My daughter, [she’s] a musician as well.

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