Roberts Kancāns
Honeybee Robotics Mechanical Engineer II
Altadena, CA
Roberts Kancāns is a Mechanical Engineer II at Honeybee Robotics, a recently-acquired subsidiary of Blue Origin specializing in the design and deployment of space mechanisms, notably for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). Honeybee's previous work includes the Rock Abrasion Tool on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, deployment mechanisms on Sentinel satellites, with upcoming and ongoing work for JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration, LAMPS, and more. Roberts's contributions can be found on both R&D and flight programs, including Lunar PlanetVac, VIPER/PRIME-1, LISTER, Dragonfly, LASVEGAS, and Europa Lander. His background also includes pyrotechnics design, particularly with relation to defense articles, and solid motor rocketry, where as a technical and operations lead of the University of Southern California's (USC) Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, he helped launch the first fully student-designed and -built rocket to space in 2019. He has a B.S. in Astronautical Engineering with a minor in Entrepreneurship and an M.S. in Product Development Engineering from USC.