"I'm extremely proud to have made a positive impact in the international aerospace community while building a wonderful family with my beautiful wife — Purdue Pharmacy Class of '93! — and raising 3 incredible children. Doing what I love for a career has kept me 'young at heart.'”
Rob's career has spanned many spaceflight systems, developing guidance and controls subsystems, avionics, and flight software for projects ranging from Earth remote sensing satellites to landing vehicles and deep space habitation.
At United Space Alliance, he led teams working on flight hardware for the Space Shuttle cockpit avionics upgrade in the early 2000s, including certification of those human-rated avionics hardware units. Rob served as the GN&C subsystem design lead for the Hubble Rescue Vehicle, which advanced the state of the art for rendezvous and docking, proximity operations, and robotic servicing. This project paved the way for NASA's successful final Hubble Space Telescope repair in 2009.
These experiences led Rob to overseeing many systems on NASA's Orion program, from contract award through three flight tests for thoseintegrated systems. Those included the GN&C subsystem team of more than 100 engineers; the flight software integrated product team of more than 200 engineers; and the program office team responsible for transitioning Orion into production following crewed flight testing. Rob established numerous strategic technical initiatives to these ends, including model-based GN&C development and at-scale Agile software development.
Now, as director of strategy for space exploration at Lockheed Martin, Rob is defining, promoting, and executing a cohesive set of growth plans for the company's space exploration programs. Through projects that span from Earth science to robotics, from space habitation to nuclear propulsion, Rob is focused on extending humanity’s knowledge of our planet, our solar system, and the universe at large.