Liang Huo

Huo Liang (born November 1982) is a Chinese aerospace engineer and entrepreneur who founded Deep Blue Aerospace in November 2016 and serves as its Chairman and CEO. He earned a PhD from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tsinghua University in 2011, studying under the noted materials-and-manufacturing academician Liu Baicheng (柳百成). He is described in Chinese-language coverage as a Tsinghua-educated PhD and Communist Party member.

After graduation, Huo spent roughly five years at China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC), working in its systems/general-design department. In 2016 he became a co-founder and vice president of OneSpace (零壹空间), one of China's earliest private launch startups, which focused on solid-propellant rockets. He then broke away to found Deep Blue Aerospace with a deliberately different bet — reusable, liquid-fueled, vertical-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (VTVL) rockets in the SpaceX mold rather than expendable solid rockets. In interviews he traces his interest in space to building model airplanes as a child and watching the 2003 Shenzhou-5 mission that carried Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, into orbit.

Under Huo, Deep Blue Aerospace has grown to roughly 100 employees (about 70% engineers) and developed the "Leiting" ("Thunder") kerolox engine family and the "Nebula" (星云) rocket series. He personally led development of the Leiting-5 engine, cited domestically as the first Chinese liquid-oxygen/kerosene engine to combine pintle-injector and electric-drive control technology and 3D-printed whole-engine manufacturing. His Nebula-M test rocket completed what Chinese media call the country's first private VTVL flight.

A note on the "investor" framing: Huo Liang's public record is that of an operating founder-CEO, not an active angel investor. The email domain (dbaspace.com) and phone number in the stub both belong to Deep Blue Aerospace. No portfolio of personal angel investments by Huo Liang could be verified; the sections below therefore describe his company and its financing rather than fabricated personal deals.

• Operating thesis, not an investment thesis: Huo's core conviction is that reusable liquid rockets — not expendable solid rockets — are the path to low-cost access to space, explicitly modeling Deep Blue Aerospace on SpaceX's reusability playbook.
• Technology bets: VTVL recovery of first stages; pintle-injector, electrically-controlled kerolox engines (Leiting/Thunder series); 3D-printed engine manufacturing to lower cost and iteration time.
• Market bets: commercial and national orbital launch services with the Nebula-1 and heavier Nebula-2, plus a consumer-facing suborbital space-tourism business.
• Stated ambition: he has publicly framed Deep Blue's goal as becoming "a driver of the space-transportation industry," with reported aspirations to IPO as early as 2028 and to close the gap with SpaceX around 2030.