PAYTON BARNWELL

Payton Barnwell is the founder and CEO of Broadside, a hyper-relevant government changelog. Broadside follows what government actually does — rules, filings, awards, enforcement actions — and works out which of it lands on a given company. She runs it from San Diego.

At SkyFi she built satellite tasking products, first as partnerships manager and then as product manager for AI and GIS analytics. The work was making Earth observation buyable by people who are not remote sensing specialists: pick an area, pick a window, get an image. She was there from 2022 to 2025.

Before that Payton Barnwell worked on special projects at First Resonance in Los Angeles, on manufacturing traceability software for hardware companies — the record of which part, from which lot, went into which build.

Payton Barnwell spent two years at Virgin Galactic in Mojave, California, as a flight sciences and mission control engineer on SpaceShipTwo. She worked flight sciences between flights and sat in mission control during them.

Payton Barnwell returned to Florida Polytechnic University as a materials engineering researcher, working there through to her mechanical engineering degree in 2019.

In 2018 Payton Barnwell was named a Brooke Owens Fellow. The fellowship places undergraduate women and gender minorities in aerospace internships and pairs each one with a senior industry mentor; she spent the summer as a mechanical engineering intern in Atlanta.

Payton Barnwell researched astronaut food at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as a mechanical engineering intern on the Veggie team, the group growing crops aboard the International Space Station. Her work was on light recipes for ‘Outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce — which combinations of LED wavelength produce the most nutritious leaf — and it became two publications.

Payton Barnwell led NASA-funded undergraduate research at Florida Polytechnic University while still an undergraduate herself. That project is what took her to Kennedy Space Center the following summer.