Team
The people building it.
A founder and two technical leads, bootstrapped to TRL 3 without external capital. Jim and Michael contribute to Delta Infinite at no cost to the company at this stage, converting to funded full-time roles at seed.
Kai Cahlil
Founder & CEO
Kai has been working toward asteroid resource capture since 2012 and founded Delta Infinite in 2022. He leads strategy, partnerships, and funding, and set up the company’s federal contracting foundation, from SAM.gov registration to a government-compliant indirect rate structure. He studied business and economics at UC Santa Cruz.
Owns
Strategy, partnerships, funding, and federal contracting.
Why this company exists
In 2012 I watched Planetary Resources launch and felt something I’d only heard other people describe: certainty about what I wanted to do with my life. I was barely past twenty and had no idea how to get there.
What I did have was time and a university library. Studying business and economics at UC Santa Cruz, I used research access to work through the asteroid mining literature. In 2014 I found the Keck Institute’s Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study. It named three questions the whole mission depended on, and one of them was how to capture and de-spin the asteroid. That question reorganized everything for me: until capture got cheaper, the whole thing would stay too expensive to attempt.
My mother — my only parent — was diagnosed with stage four cancer on my birthday in 2013, and died in March 2015. I left school. For a full year afterward I worked on a single question, the one I knew would shape the rest of my life: what am I here for. I worked it the way my coursework had taught me to work a market. Learn the niche, find the gap, build the solution. The answer I kept arriving at was expanding human presence in space, and the gap was asteroid mining — which was where I’d already found the cost problem nobody had solved.
I spent the next two years narrowing from asteroid mining to capture specifically, tracking every method proposed across the history of spaceflight. In 2017 NASA cancelled its Asteroid Redirect Mission on cost. In 2018 Planetary Resources closed, and I spent that year in the patent landscape holding a single question: how do you make this cheaper?
The answer arrived late that year. A space-rated foam could form a stable interface with an object that isn’t cooperating, at a fraction of the cost of the mechanically complex capture systems that had been priced and rejected. I named the company I’d build around it Delta Infinite — infinite change — three years before I founded it.
On my thirtieth birthday I was home sick with COVID, my travel plans cancelled. I bought the web domain that day, and I chose the day on purpose. My birthday had been defined by the beginning of a painful ending. I wanted it to be the start of something instead.
Jim Cochran-Miller
Engineering Lead
Jim takes concepts through testing into practical application. Ten-plus years managing the design and construction of district energy and energy conservation systems — hydronic, controls, telecommunications, electrical, and manufacturing process systems — for clients including Apple, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, UC Berkeley, and CSU Fresno, on projects ranging from $10M to $200M. Aeronautical and mechanical engineering, Clarkson University.
At Delta Infinite he builds the test environment. The vacuum chamber the foam is tested in is his, now in its third revision, and he leads the expansion into thermal cycling and UV exposure.
“I love being able to identify a problem, break it into solvable pieces, and then tackle those pieces one at a time.”
Owns
Test hardware, the vacuum chamber, and test-campaign execution.
Dr. Michael Browne
Science Lead
Michael leads foam chemistry, cure characterization, and materials testing. PhD in analytical and biophysical chemistry from University of the Pacific; BS in pharmaceutical chemistry from UC Davis. Managed the University of the Pacific mass spectrometry facility, with instrumentation depth across LC-MS/MS, GC-MS/MS, pyrolysis GC-MS, DART-MS, and HRMS. Published in the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry, Biopolymers, and the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry. Previously at Chevron Energy Technology. Currently a PK/PD bioanalytics scientist at Firefly Bio.
His work at Delta Infinite focuses on the two problems that gate everything else: vacuum bubble collapse and cure kinetics. He defines the analytical instrumentation strategy for the thermal-vacuum campaign.
Owns
Foam chemistry, cure characterization, and the analytical side of the test campaign.
Thornelia
Growth Lead
As a Mammillaria spinosissima, Thornelia champions patient, resilient growth, thriving under harsh conditions and reminding the team that even the most ambitious missions begin with strong roots.
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Investors, capture and servicing operators, program offices, and researchers working on non-cooperative capture: we’d like to hear from you.