Jonathon Smith, CEO
I am fortunate to have spent most of my career working on projects in deep space
As a navigator at KinetX Aerospace and later NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), I helped guide spacecraft to Venus, Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and comets 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and Hartley 2. I also have a longstanding passion for space software, as an engineer, developer, and educator. At JPL I worked as a developer on the Monte software platform and later transitioned into training and outreach lead for the project
Over the past several years, my interests have turned increasingly towards technical leadership and the challenge of solving difficult, poorly-defined problems. As a group supervisor at JPL, I managed a diverse group of engineers working on topics ranging from small body trajectory research to high performance computing services. At Planetary Resources, I guided the formation of an in-house astrodynamics group, and matured the mission design of an ambitious, low-cost asteroid exploration mission. I also served as Navigation Lead at Advanced Space, where I led a Phase I SBIR on the sustainability of extremely low lunar orbits, and served as mission design lead on a NASA Discovery Mission proposal team
I am currently working as a consultant through my personal firm Astroceanic (as-tro-see-an-ic) while pursuing other entrepreneurial projects
