Solange Massa’s career has spanned worlds that rarely overlap. In this episode, Jim sits down with the Ecoatoms founder to trace her journey from professional opera singer to medical researcher and ultimately to building space-ready payloads for microgravity experiments. Solange explains how curiosity, resilience, and learning through failure shaped her path, what it really takes to send experiments to space, and why some of the most meaningful breakthroughs happen when you stop following the expected route.
This episode of Just Gonna Send It features host Jim Belosic with Solange Massa, CEO and founder of Ecoatoms, a company building space payloads for microgravity experiments. Solange breaks down how “boxes in rockets” turn into real R and D platforms for biology, chemistry, and materials, and why space is becoming a practical manufacturing environment instead of a sci-fi luxury.
Solange’s first career was not aerospace, it was opera. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, she started singing professionally as a kid, built a serious performance career, and learned early what rejection feels like and how to keep going anyway. That constant audition cycle shaped her resilience long before she ever pitched a technical idea.
She eventually chose medicine and research over a full time music career, chasing the parts of science that felt most “buildable” and impactful. Her work centered on organs on a chip and biosensors, trying to improve how we detect tiny concentrations of biomarkers in blood. A key blocker was the coating process on sensors, inconsistent results and hard chemistry problems that were difficult to control on Earth.
A conversation with a friend at Blue Origin flipped the frame. Solange learned that some coatings form more evenly in microgravity and vacuum, and she decided to submit a NASA proposal mostly to get feedback. Instead, NASA funded it. What began as a science experiment quickly evolved into a payload engineering business once she realized the payload itself was the product that could unlock many experiments.
Solange built Ecoatoms around making space access more reliable for researchers and companies. She emphasizes designing like a medical device builder, redundancy and failure intolerance, not like a one off science project. Her first payload used a twin redundant approach so if one system failed, the other could still deliver results. That mindset helped Ecoatoms win follow-on contracts and move fast, with four missions flown in under two years, largely through contracts rather than massive VC rounds.
The episode gets real about space readiness: vibe and shock testing, fluidics plus electronics plus biology living inside one system, and the constant pressure of launch timelines. Solange shares “raccoons in the ceiling” moments, including a high RPM centrifuge scenario that turned into a serious safety lesson. Her core theme is that space hardware is never clean or simple, it is interdisciplinary, high stakes, and always one mistake away from chaos.
Ecoatoms is pushing toward standardized, accessible payload platforms so users do not need to be aerospace engineers to run microgravity research. Solange describes building a no code capable flight tested computer system that can run missions and interface with experiments, aiming to make “send your science to space” more practical over time. Longer term, she’s thinking about lunar and Mars environments, especially biological payloads that can de risk human exploration.
Jim Belosic sits down with Solange Massa, CEO and founder of Ecoatoms, to talk about making space usable for real world science and manufacturing. Solange explains how Ecoatoms builds payloads that fly experiments in microgravity, why vacuum and zero gravity can actually improve certain chemical and biological processes, and how costs have dropped into the hundreds of thousands for some missions thanks to lower cost launch options.
Solange’s path is anything but typical. She grew up in Buenos Aires, spent years as a professional opera singer, then pivoted into medicine, research, and a PhD focused on organs on a chip and biosensors. A coating problem on sensor chemistry led to a breakthrough insight: microgravity can produce more uniform results. She applied to NASA expecting feedback and instead got funded, kicking off Ecoatoms and a rapid run of missions.
They dig into what it really takes to fly hardware, vibe and shock testing, fluidics plus electronics plus biology in one system, and why redundancy matters when failure is not an option. Solange also shares what she is building next: more plug and play payload platforms that let researchers run space experiments without needing to be aerospace engineers, plus a longer horizon toward lunar and Mars biology.
