Skyler Chan is the founder of GRU Space (Galactic Resource Utilization Space, Inc.), a YC W26 company building the world's first commercial habitat hotel on the moon. GRU’s mission is to make humanity interplanetary by establishing a commercially driven pathway to space tourism on the moon, and eventually Mars.
In the first 24 hours after launch, GRU Space was covered by 100+ articles and picked up by national news outlets in 20+ countries, including features on Morning Brew, Polymarket, Fox News, CNBC, and Ars Technica.
Skyler graduated from UC Berkeley in three years and started GRU Space the day before his graduation ceremony.
Early Life: Space Books and a Glider Program in Vancouver
Skyler grew up in Vancouver, Canada, and from a young age was the kid in the back of class reading space books. At 7 years old, he was drawing planetary habitats. By the time he was 12, he had read An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield and was inspired.
One section of the book described how the author had learned to fly gliders on an Air Force base as a teenager. Skyler decided he wanted to do the same thing. His father's initial reaction was that his son was not joining the Air Force at age 12. Skyler spent a full year convincing his parents to let him apply.
The program accepted 320 students out of roughly 23,000 applicants. Getting in required three years of ground training before the summer flight program, covering subjects like meteorology, air law, radio theory, and the physics of flight. Once on base, the days started at 4:50 A.M., meals were in the mess hall, and cadets spent five to six hours a day in their flight suits pushing gliders across the airfield before getting to fly them.
By the time Skyler completed the program at 16, he had shifted his thinking. Becoming a test pilot or a fighter pilot no longer felt like the most impactful path. He had started asking a bigger question: what is the most meaningful thing a person born at this moment in history could actually do?
His answer was to make humanity interplanetary. His reasoning was simple: no human being has ever left cislunar space, and the people alive today are the first generation for whom going to the moon and Mars is a real possibility within their lifetime.
High School: Cold Outreach to University Space Teams and a NASA Program
Skyler attended public school in Vancouver and was largely self-directed when it came to space. There was no local aerospace community to plug into and no one in his family with a background in tech or engineering. So he found his own way in.
In high school, he began cold-emailing university rocket teams and satellite clubs, asking if he could shadow them or help with anything. One student took him on and mentored him through his first technical project: building an orbit propagator in Python for a satellite called Finch.
He then joined SEDS Canada (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), an organization run primarily by graduate students and Canadian Space Agency professionals. The only role open to a high schooler was Chief Recruiting Officer. Skyler applied, got in, and found himself interviewing candidates twice his age, all as a volunteer.
He was also selected as the Canadian delegate to the Global Space School program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, a competitive program that brought together top high school students from countries including New Zealand, India, France, Germany, Chile, and Argentina.
Because the program moved online during COVID and had to accommodate delegates across every time zone, the calls happened at 5am Pacific time. Skyler was on every one of them, and by his own account, was consistently the first person to raise his hand to ask the astronauts questions. The student cohort's project was to pitch an asteroid mining system targeting the metallic asteroid Psyche 16.
Berkeley: EECS, a Mars Habitat Club, and a 3D Printer in Space
Skyler enrolled at UC Berkeley to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He chose this program he specifically because it covered both hardware and software, which he believed were both necessary to build systems for humans to live off-world.
He joined a Mars habitat research lab his first semester but left quickly. The work was simulation-based, and he wanted to build real systems. He then joined all three of Berkeley's major space student organizations (the rocketry team, the space robotics team, and the satellite team) but still felt that none of them were aimed specifically at the problem he cared about: surface habitation on the moon and Mars.
So he started a club himself. The Mars Habitat Club at Berkeley launched in his second year with three co-founders he recruited from the other space organizations. A footnote worth noting: all three of those co-founders later got into Y Combinator with their own companies.
During the same period, a contact Skyler had first reached out to in high school (who had since completed a PhD at Berkeley) brought him onto a NASA-funded project building a compact 3D printer to fly to space. The printer used a process called computed axillography, a resin-based technique, to study how materials cure in a microgravity environment. Skyler worked on the embedded systems. The payload flew on Virgin Galactic's Unity spaceship. Sir Richard Branson was at the New Mexico launch site, along with the private astronauts who went up on the flight.
The summer before his junior year, Skyler interned at Tesla building vehicle software. He has cited reading Elon Musk's biography as part of what he wanted to absorb during that period: how great engineers work.
By his third year, Skyler had enough credits to graduate early. He decided to leave Berkeley a year ahead of schedule to start GRU Space. He has been vocal about his skepticism of dropping out: in his view, graduating early to start a company is a different thing from dropping out for the performance of it.
GRU Space: Starting the Company the Day Before Graduation
The week before graduation, Skyler skipped classes to start GRU Space. He described the week as chaotic; he was simultaneously closing early investors and preparing for commencement. Every investor he closed during that period, he closed on the same call. He believes the obsession was visible, and that's what drove the quick decisions.
The day before graduation, he had a three-hour meeting with an investor who was pushing a term sheet. He left mid-meeting to have lunch with his parents, who had traveled in for the ceremony and were still trying to understand what he was actually doing. He then took an Uber to his Y Combinator interview, arriving ten minutes late to a ten-minute interview.
Luckily, YC was running behind. He got in the room, and spent roughly half the interview making the case for why making humanity interplanetary is the most important thing a person could work on. He left thinking it probably hadn't gone well.
That night, crossing the Bay Bridge at around 10pm after a long dinner with his family, he got a call from his YC partner. He was told he'd been accepted into the Winter 2026 batch. He said he'd think about it overnight, slept four hours, and accepted in the morning.
At 6am he was at his graduation ceremony. He accepted the YC offer while standing in line, waiting to cross the stage. The confirmation email arrived when he sat back down.
GRU Space: The Strategy and the 2029 Moon Mission
GRU Space's thesis is that the barrier to becoming an interplanetary civilization is not technology, it's economics and global coordination. The hardware to go to the moon exists. What doesn't exist yet is a self-sustaining economic model that doesn't depend on government contracts or B2B sales to launch companies that want their own vertically integrated supply chains.
Skyler's approach is to go directly to space tourism, extend it to the moon, and use commercial demand to fund the infrastructure required to eventually support permanent habitation. The hotel is not the end goal, but it is the financial mechanism to get humans living on the moon and Mars.
GRU Space's first concrete milestone is a 2029 mission to manufacture the world's first brick on the moon, made from lunar surface material (moon regolith). The brick is the building block for the habitat hotel. Brands interested in having their logo on the first object manufactured on the moon can reach out to the team directly.
The company received coverage from over 100 outlets in its first 24 hours after launch, across 20+ countries, which Skyler has described as a signal that the world is ready for this conversation.
Getting in Touch with Skyler and GRU Space
Right now, GRU Space is currently hiring mechanical engineers who want to work on off-world surface habitation systems. Applications are open at GRU Space's careers page.
Brands interested in the 2029 moon brick partnership opportunity can reach out to the team directly through the GRU Space website.
The best way to contact Skyler is to reach out via email / LinkedIn / Twitter DM.
Skyler’s Personal Website https://www.skylerchan.ca/
Skyler’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/skylerchan03/
Skyler’s Twitter https://x.com/skyler_chan_
Skyler’s Email Address [email protected]
GRU Space Website https://www.GRU.space/
GRU Space YC Company Page https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/galactic-resource-utilization-space-inc-GRU-space
GRU Space LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/galactic-resource-utilization-space-inc/posts/?feedView=all
GRU Space Twitter https://x.com/GRU_space