Cleave has over 35 years’ experience in the space industry as an engineer, program management and executive leader with profit & loss responsibilities. He has worked nearly every mission area, from rovers on Mars to remote sensing and communication satellites, and from low Earth to Geosynchronous Orbit. Robert has also worked in every segment of the value chain, spanning spacecraft and payloads, launch vehicles and ground systems. He managed over $2B in business development, and successfully delivered secure networking solutions to the US Government, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Japanese government. He managed investment portfolios and made multiple strategic investments into several companies.
Robert continuously seeks to create use cases where space-based networks can be leveraged on earth. In the mid-1990s, he invented a satellite-based machine-to-machine solution which remains in use today, and later was the founder of XTAR, LLC, the worlds’ first satellite operator to exclusively offer communication services at the coveted X-band.
More recently, Cleave has focused on ground-based technologies, and co-founded NewSpace Networks Inc., a software company building highly efficient networking solutions leveraging virtualization and edge computing over satellite-based networks, which was recently sold to SEMPRE.AI. Robert is currently their Chief Operating Officer.
He is also a co-founder of Secure PNT Inc., a company providing advanced digital antenna beam forming technologies for anti-jamming and phased arrays, and is an advisor to several companies, a US national lab, and an international government.
Robert is an angel investor, a prolific author with multiple patents, a TED speaker, and remains active with several non-profits. Robert received multiple awards throughout his career and earned an Aerospace Engineering degree at Arizona State University and a Systems Engineering Certificate from the University of Southern California.