Angelina Tsuboi

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Photo: angelinatsuboi.net / Press

At seven years old, most children are learning to read chapter books. Angelina Tsuboi was learning to write code. In her first computer science class at a California elementary school, she encountered the logic of programming — the way instructions become actions, the way a machine can be made to think — and something clicked permanently. Within years she would be fluent in more than twenty programming languages, building hardware in her bedroom, writing aerospace security research papers, and teaching satellite hacking to professional cybersecurity practitioners worldwide.

Angelina grew up in California in a Japanese-American family and pursued her interest in technology with the focused intensity of someone who has found the thing they are built for. By her early teens she had not just learned to code — she had turned toward some of the most specialised and consequential corners of the field: aerospace cybersecurity, satellite systems, drone security, the vulnerabilities in the infrastructure that modern civilisation depends on but rarely thinks about. The GPS in every smartphone, the communications relays above every continent, the guidance systems on commercial aircraft — all of these are networks, and networks can be compromised. Angelina wanted to understand how, and more importantly, how to stop it.

She founded Stellaryx Labs while still a teenager. The company operates at the intersection of space, security, and software development — providing research, consulting, and educational resources on aerospace cybersecurity. That a teenager could found a functioning company in one of the most technically demanding niches in modern technology was itself a statement; that the company's work was substantive enough to attract professional clients and collaborators was another. Stellaryx Labs was not a school project with a logo. It was a real entity doing real work in a field where the stakes are genuinely high.

The recognition that most dramatically announced Angelina to the wider world came when she was invited to speak at the annual aerospace cybersecurity conference held at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida — and became its youngest speaker in history. Kennedy Space Center is not a venue that issues invitations casually. The conference draws practitioners from across the aerospace industry, government agencies, and research institutions. To stand in that room and address those people — to be the youngest person ever to do so — required not just knowledge but credibility. Angelina had both.

Her research work extended to NASA itself, where she contributed as a scientific researcher on projects involving astrophysics and the intersection of space science with cybersecurity. The breadth of her technical engagement — software development, mechatronics, hardware hacking, academic research, company founding, conference speaking — is itself a kind of argument about what a young person in technology can accomplish when curiosity is the only throttle. She is also a licensed pilot, which situates her technical interest in aerospace in something more embodied: she knows what it feels like to be in the sky, and she understands what it means to trust systems with human life.

Beyond her technical achievements, Angelina has been a consistent and vocal advocate for girls and young women in STEM. She accepted a place at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before deferring for a gap year that she spent teaching children in underserved communities around the world about computer science — a choice that says something important about where her priorities lie. She is featured in Scholastic Upfront magazine, in CNBC's Nightly News for Kids, and in Fox News's profile segments on young technologists. She runs courses on Udemy in satellite cybersecurity and aerospace hacking that are taken by professional practitioners from every continent. The teenager who hacked satellites in her bedroom now teaches the people who are supposed to stop satellite hacking from happening.

Known informally as the "Queen of Coding," Angelina Tsuboi represents a generation of young women who entered technology not through the conventional pipeline of computer science degrees and corporate internships, but through the sheer force of curiosity and the internet's willingness to teach anyone who is genuinely willing to learn.