Mikhail Kokorich

Mikhail Valeryevich Kokorich was born on 11 October 1976 in Aginskoye, in what was then Chita Oblast, and grew up in Siberia. He studied physics at Novosibirsk State University, reaching it through its Specialized Educational Scientific Center, the Soviet system’s selective school for scientifically able children. He later took an MBA at the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO and completed the Stanford Executive Program.

His first businesses had nothing to do with aerospace. He founded Dauria as a student in 1997, supplying blasting services and chemical reagents to mining and construction. He built a domestic-goods retail chain, Chudodom, from 2004, merged it with a competitor in 2009 and sold out in 2013; in 2010 he picked up the electronics chain Technosila cheaply after the financial crisis and sold it in 2012 to move into space.

Dauria Aerospace, founded in 2011, was Russia’s first significant private space company. It was headquartered in Munich with subsidiaries in Mountain View and Moscow, raised $20 million from I2BF Global Ventures in 2013, and launched five satellites between 2014 and 2017. Its non-Russian operations wound down in 2015 as the geopolitics turned. Kokorich had by then moved to the United States, where he co-founded Astro Digital and, in 2017, the space-tug company Momentus in Santa Clara.

Momentus is the episode that shapes how he is read. The company won a NASA iTech prize in 2019 and raised $143 million privately before pursuing a listing through a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company Stable Road. In January 2021 the deal stalled: the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States raised concerns about Kokorich’s and co-founder Lev Hasis’s Russian citizenship and their access to the company’s technology, and under Department of Defense pressure Kokorich resigned as chief executive and from the board. The company completed its listing that August under a new chief executive, the former US defence official John Rood.

In July 2021 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Momentus, Stable Road, the SPAC’s sponsor, its chief executive Brian Kabot, and Kokorich personally. The allegation against Kokorich was that he had misrepresented both the viability of the company’s propulsion technology and his own status as a national-security risk, inducing shareholders to approve a merger in which he stood to receive shares worth upwards of $200 million. He settled in November 2024 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, agreeing to a $2 million civil penalty and a five-year bar on serving as an officer or director of a public company. He neither admitted nor denied the allegations.

He moved to Switzerland in 2021 and founded Destinus, initially to build hydrogen-powered hypersonic cargo aircraft; a prototype named Jungfrau30 first flew that November. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 he condemned the war publicly and joined the Anti-War Committee of Russia. In January 2024 he renounced his Russian citizenship, citing fundamental disagreement with the government’s policies, and now holds Grenadian citizenship.