David Venegas, Founder & CEO of Edgerun, August 25, 2026
If you're reading this, you've probably seen what we build: a powered exoskeleton for soldiers. It reads the wearer's gait and delivers torque at the hip, so infantry can carry their combat load farther and faster. That is our first product. It is not the whole story.
The mission of Edgerun (and the reason I built the first hardware in my apartment with my own hands and my own money, before anyone else was involved) is to upgrade the human: to build the equipment that lets people operate in environments the body was never made for. It starts with war and powered mobility. Eventually, we expand the very worlds we can inhabit.
I know how that sounds. A hip exoskeleton and living on other planets seem unrelated. If I do my job in this letter, by the end they will make sense. But to explain, I have to start a long way from the battlefield.
Humanity is drawn to the frontier. We desire a horizon to focus our energies. We make heroes out of those who brave those frontiers, even if they do not return, because they act out something ancient and important in us.
But exploration has always waited on technology. Take the remarkable expansion of the Polynesians across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Initially, it was rapid, so long as new islands were in visible range. But when they reached open ocean, everything stopped. For centuries. Until what is today South China developed better ships. With the new technology, the Polynesians pushed onward and eventually reached the Americas.
Once again we are now poised at the edge of a great sea. This time it’s called space.
For decades, the ships have been the problem. That just changed. In 1967, we set a record for orbital launches that stood until 2021, over 54 years later. We have continued to break that record every year since, with rockets getting bigger and cheaper. Despite the delay, a new Space Age has begun.
Even though we have better ships, with every spaceflight metric (launch count, payload mass, satellites, cost per kilogram) increasing by an order of magnitude or more - the human number has not moved at all.
Today’s spacesuits are not even at 1960s readiness, the knowledge is literally lost. We are pulling Apollo engineers out of retirement. There is one active $3.5 billion contract to deliver next-generation suits, but nothing has been delivered. NASA OIG has published audits in 2017, 2021, 2025, and 2026, tracking nearly a decade of escalating concerns. Each one is 50-pages of professionally saying "everything is on fire."
Getting millions of people beyond this planet requires an entirely different approach, and the answer is hiding in how we solved human spaceflight the first time.
In 1935, David Clark Company started by making women's bras and girdles. I promise this is relevant. In 1941, Clark realized the same compression mechanics would keep a pilot from blacking out and built the first anti-G suit, which evolved into the spacesuits worn by Mercury and Gemini crews. Similarly, ILC Dover first ran its undergarment line before building the A7L suit that walked on the Moon. Same factory. Same seamstresses. The technology that took humans off this planet came out of two underwear companies that solved commercial problems on Earth first.
Equipment that can only be tested in orbit can barely be tested at all: each article costs over $100 million, a failed test kills the pilot, and you get one iteration per launch window. That is why the only serious program holds a $3.5 billion contract and a decade of audits instead of a delivered suit. For that money you could buy every girdle in America.
It is not a money problem. It’s an iteration problem: the millions of repetitions that turn prototypes into equipment you trust your life in, require real users in a competitive market, paying customers, testing and verifying in real conditions. Whoever builds the missing technology for space must prove it on Earth first.