Every satellite flies through radiation. The question is whether its designers planned for that or hoped for the best.
Merek Chertkow is the CEO and Co-Founder of The Radiation Team, a radiation engineering firm based in Renton, Washington, that helps commercial and government space programs design systems capable of surviving the orbital radiation environment. Before co-founding the company in 2022, he held radiation engineering leadership roles at SpaceX and Blue Origin, where he developed qualification strategies that were adopted across multiple flight programs and approved by NASA, the Air Force, and The Aerospace Corporation.
The experience at those two companies shaped a particular view of the problem. SpaceX and Blue Origin fly commercial off-the-shelf components and automotive-grade integrated circuits in space, which means their radiation engineers cannot rely on traditional mil-spec parts lists. Instead, they analyze specific mission profiles, model the radiation environment for each orbit, and design mitigation strategies at the system level. Chertkow brought that methodology to The Radiation Team, where his engineers work with clients from mission inception through flight qualification.
The approach addresses a gap in the market. Legacy radiation hardening was built for programs that could afford rad-hard parts at premium prices and multi-year qualification timelines. The proliferated LEO constellations now being built by defense agencies and commercial operators cannot. SatNews covered this tension in March 2026, when an analysis of the Space Development Agency’s proliferated architecture found that software-defined smallsats face persistent radiation vulnerabilities that legacy approaches were not designed to address. A month earlier, SatNews reported from SmallSat Symposium on the radiation physics cliff facing lunar missions, where the protective magnetosphere that shields LEO operations disappears entirely.
The Radiation Team’s client base spans startups building their first satellite to defense contractors qualifying systems for proliferated LEO programs. Current work includes pre-flight testing for Blackwing’s first Sparrow nanosatellite mission, scheduled for late 2026.
At SmallSat Europe, Chertkow delivers a Tech Brief titled “Modernizing Radiation Hardening Approaches.”
Radiation does not negotiate with schedule pressure or component budgets. Chertkow’s business exists because someone has to do the math.
