Wanjiku Chebet Kanjumba is a spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control researcher and aerospace entrepreneur whose work addresses one of the central technical obstacles to orbital debris remediation, which is the problem of approaching and capturing objects that cannot cooperate with the spacecraft sent to retrieve them. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Space Operations from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2020 and a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering with Distinction from Embry-Riddle in 2021, specializing in the dynamics and control of aerospace vehicles, including six-degrees-of-freedom rigid body dynamics, guidance, navigation and control, and rocket propulsion. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Florida, where she conducts her dissertation research under Dr. Norman Fitz-Coy. She is also pursuing professional certifications in Engineering Leadership, Engineering Innovation, and Engineering Project Management.

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Her doctoral work, the HARMONIA project, develops a unified guidance and control framework for rendezvous and capture with targets that are both tumbling and uncooperative. Nearly every object that drives collision risk in Low-Earth Orbit falls into that category. Derelict rocket bodies and defunct satellites do not transmit their position, do not hold a stable attitude, and were not built with any feature intended to be grasped. A companion effort, HARMONIA-ID, addresses the question that precedes capture, which is how a servicing spacecraft infers a target's geometry, candidate attachment points, mass properties, and rotation state from limited sensing before any contact is attempted. Taken together, the two lines of work treat characterization and control as a single problem, because in practice a removal mission cannot separate them.

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Ms. Kanjumba's debris-related research has been presented at the Small Satellite Conference, where her published work covers in-transit debris remediation and a micro-servicer swarm architecture for distributed servicing and disposal, and at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference. Her AIAA SciTech 2026 paper, HARMONIA: A Hybrid Docking and Grappling System for Next-Generation In-Orbit Servicing and Active Debris Removal, sets out that framework in full and was one of five papers she presented at the forum. Three of her papers have been accepted to the 2027 IEEE Aerospace Conference, including one in the conference's session on space debris and micrometeoroids, one on cooperative and non-cooperative capture, and one on autonomous conjunction management. Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in the journal New Space, where she also serves as a reviewer, and she has published research on satellite constellation design for maritime security and on integrated architectures for interplanetary infrastructure. She writes for general audiences as well, with articles in The Conversation U.S. on why retrieving dead and tumbling satellites is so difficult and on the autonomy that future lunar surface robots will require.

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Before returning to full-time research, Ms. Kanjumba spent two years at Gulfstream Aerospace in Savannah, Georgia, as Functional Lead, Airworthiness Engineer, and Completions Certification Engineer, certifying aircraft against airworthiness standards and working alongside international powerplant and airframe manufacturers. She has also worked as an aerospace controls engineer at Switched Source, and she served as a Director, Aerospace Engineer, and Assistant Head of Strategy and Communications at SPARC (K), an independent Kenyan space company. That grounding in a regulated certification environment shapes the view she brings to debris work, which is that mitigation and removal provisions reach a fleet at scale when licensing and procurement require them. She is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vicillion Inc., an early-stage aerospace R&D company developing coordination infrastructure for spaceports and orbital operations. Vicillion is a member of the Global Spaceport Alliance, and its flagship initiative is Omega Spaceport, a planned equatorial launch facility on Kenya's coast now at a foundational stage.

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Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Ms. Kanjumba holds an R&D Career Astronaut Candidate position with Titans Space Industries, where she also serves as Director of Spaceport Development. She has held the astronaut candidate position since 2025 and is assigned to an inaugural flight in 2030. She completed the Advanced PoSSUM Academy in 2018 as its first Kenyan-born graduate within the Scientist-Astronaut Candidate Program of the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences. Since 2023, she has contributed to the European Space Agency as a citizen scientist on its Systematic Threat Analysis of Radiation from Space project, studying the effects of ionizing radiation on crew, and she is a member of the Space Generation Advisory Council and of its Commercial Space Project Group. Alongside her technical work, she writes and speaks on equitable access to space and on African participation in the global space economy, a subject she approaches from the position that the barrier has more often been invitation than interest. She mentors through the Zed Factor Fellowship and Women in Space Kenya, and she serves as an ambassador for Mission ShakthiSAT.

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As a member of the Advisory Board of the Space Debris Foundation, Ms. Kanjumba brings the perspective of a researcher working directly on the capture problem that sits at the center of active debris removal, together with the operational view of a founder building coordination infrastructure for launch and orbital traffic. She is committed to advancing debris remediation that is technically credible as well as ambitious, to strengthening the connection between the engineering community and the policy forums where orbital sustainability is decided, and to widening participation in that conversation so that the nation’s most dependent on a usable orbital environment help shape the rules that protect it.