Inspired in his youth by Star Wars, Mr. Hakamada studied Aerospace engineering, completing his masters at the Georgie Institute of Technology in 2006. During his studies, he witnessed the dawn of the commercial space industry with the success of human space flight during the Ansari XPRIZE competition.

After graduation, Mr. Hakamada entered a management consulting firm to develop his business and management skills. In 2013, he became lead of Team HAKUTO, competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, and concurrently founded ispace technologies, a lunar exploration company that primarily locates, extracts, and delivers lunar ice to customers in cis-lunar space.