J.D. Russell is an American entrepreneur and spaceflight participant who flew to space aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard missions NS-28 and NS-34. He launched Alpha Funds, a venture capital and mergers and acquisitions firm focused on aerospace and frontier technologies. His spaceflight experiences helped inspire Alpha Funds’ flagship initiative, Alpha Aerospace, which invests in early-stage propulsion and advanced manufacturing startups. Prior to this, Russell founded a property management company and successfully completed a rollup strategy with multiple mergers and acquisitions of real estate management and service firms across the United States, ultimately developing a proprietary software system to scale operations. He also founded the Victoria Russell Foundation, named for his late daughter, to promote children’s literacy through a partnership with Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.