Balazs Slezak
CEO, FOUNDER
Balazs founded Wozify in 2012 and has led it through more than 30 digital products. Before focusing on space, he co-founded, built and sold a 3D-printing company.
As a mentor he has worked with around 300 space startups through ESA BIC, the UK Space Agency Accelerator, the Techstars Space Accelerator and EUSPA's CASSINI programme, and he serves as an external evaluator for NATO DIANA. His method is the PULL framework, adapted to the space sector, to help founders find the customers who are already looking for what they build.
In 2026 he won Space Mentor of the Year at the UK Space Skills Awards, chosen by public vote. He was also a top-three finalist for the 2025 Sir Arthur Clarke Award for Education and Outreach, and a finalist for the UK Space Agency's Guiding Star award in 2024.
Balazs believes humanity's long-term future is as a multiplanetary civilisation, and that getting there will take a working space economy as well as rockets. Agencies and launch providers are laying the infrastructure: cheaper access to orbit, commercial lunar landers and ever larger satellite constellations.
Most of what runs on that infrastructure, from Earth observation services to lunar operations and in-space manufacturing, will be built by startups. That is why he spends so much of his time mentoring founders, and why Astro42 exists: to give the companies building the space economy software they can rely on, so their own teams can focus on the science and the hardware.
