About
We do the dirty work.
How Hephaestus Industry started, what we have built so far, and exactly how far along we are.
How we got our start
One piece of NASA technology, and a lot of nerve.
Since opening in 2021 we have been engineering our path rather than waiting for one.
We started with a single piece of technology out of NASA and began building off it. The goal from day one has been the equipment that starts the mining and the construction on low-gravity surfaces — the Moon first, then Mars.
Many nations and many companies are working hard to get people to those places. Far fewer are working on what happens the morning after they land, when somebody has to move ten thousand tonnes of regolith and there is no equipment yard for four hundred thousand kilometres. We will do the dirty work for the new settlements.
Where we actually are. Hephaestus Industry is a small company in Picayune, Mississippi, founded in 2021. We are designing hardware, cutting parts, and filing patents on our own ideas. We have not flown anything yet, and we say so on every page of this website rather than let anyone assume otherwise. Everything described here is what we are building toward.
What we are doing right now
Three honest sentences.
Creating and making it happen
We are still learning how to build and edit this website and how to run computer-aided design properly. Some parts get cut in house; others are ordered online while we build up our own capability.
As we go, more of it happens on our own floor.
Growing, slowly
We are a growing company and we are honest about the pace. We are creating designs and submitting patents on a number of our ideas.
We hope to get larger soon. Right now, small and moving.
Designing for commerce
We are looking at working with a coffee brand, and custom patches and coins are coming.
When we run our crowdfunding campaign we want something real at every level. Shirts today, a good deal more shortly.
The shop
Where the parts come from.
Sheet steel, a brake, and a lot of trial and error. This is where the drive wheel blades and frames get made.
Every part we cut ourselves teaches us something a drawing never would — how the material behaves, where the design was optimistic, what will actually survive being loaded and unloaded a thousand times.
What we will not tell you
The claims we are not making.
- We have not flown hardware. Nothing on this site is presented as flight-proven.
- We are not under contract to NASA or to any space agency. Our imagery is NASA public-domain material and nothing more than that.
- We do not have a launch date, because that is not ours to set.
- We are not hiring today. The careers page is a list for when we are.
- When any of that changes, this page changes with it.
Why we bother saying all this. The space industry has a long history of companies describing what they intend to do as though it were already done. We would rather be the ones you can check.
Come along
It is early. That is the interesting part.
The people who show up before a thing exists are the ones who get to shape it.