Jeffrey Manber, Managing Director
Jeffrey has three decades of experience in bringing innovative space projects to the marketplace, both in the manned and unmanned space exploration and utilization. His experience includes working as an adviser to the chairman of PanAmSat, the first privately owned international satellite venture, as the company raised its first outside rounds of financing.
He also served as COO of AstroVision, which developed and patented the first real-time moving images of the Earth. For most of the 1990′s Jeff worked to bring together the American and Russian space programs. In the early 1990′s he carried over the first contract between NASA and the then-Soviet organization RSC Energia. Later, he represented the Russian space organizations as the basic contracts to realize the International Space Station came about.
As CEO of MirCorp, which leased the Russian space station Mir, Jeff is the only businessman to have ever marketed an orbiting space station and conducted a commercial manned mission to space (MirCorp-1.) While leading MirCorp, Manber signed historic space-based media and entertainment deals with space tourist Dennis Tito, Survivor television producer Mark Burnett and movie producer James Cameron. He also co-developed the first fund dedicated to commercial space on Wall Street (Shearson Lehman) and has served as an adviser to numerous companies and governments. The author of two books, his second (Selling Peace) chronicles his time working with the Russian space program.
Mike Johnson, Chief Technology Officer
Mike has over 20 years of experience in the aerospace industry. Mr. Johnson received his B.A. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology in 1989. He has extensive spacecraft design, fabrication and operations experience obtained through his association with the SPACEHAB Module program since 1991. Located in Houston, Texas, Mr. Johnson has extensive experience in working NASA programs on Mir, shuttle, Soyuz, HTV as well as commercial vehicles. In addition, Mr. Johnson holds 3 issued US Patents and has four others pending.
Christopher K. Cummins, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer
Chris is an experienced financial innovator with an aerospace background, and has been involved in the financing side of commercial space since 1981. Prior to being a pioneer in developing fund-linked products at Citigroup, Chris consulted to various aerospace companies and worked at NASA/JSC developing cost and schedule estimates for the ISS. Mr. Cummins holds a MS in Statistics from NYU, a MBA from Yale, and a BA in physics and government from Cornell.
Richard Pournelle, Senior Vice-President of Business Development
Rich has been involved in commercial space for over ten years. Prior to NanoRacks, Rich worked for investment bank Near Earth helping aerospace companies raise capital. Rich spent eight years working at Mojave Spaceport as Director of Business Development for XCOR Aerospace. Rich served as Professional Staff for the Committee on House Administration where he helped create the THOMAS legislative information system. Rich holds a BA in Political Science from UCLA.
W. Patrick Sinnott III, Chief Engineer
Patrick has over two decades of hands-on experience in designing payloads. He is versed in all aspects of spaceflight fabrication hardware process including: ground and flight hardware fabrication and requirements, verification process, integration process, operations, crew training, payload recovery operations, and ground operations.
Key Partners:
Bob Twiggs
Prof. Twiggs is currently a professor of Astronautical engineering at Morehead State University in Kentucky. He joined Morehead State July 2009 to assist in the development of a Space Systems curriculum. Prior to that he was a consulting professor in the Aeronatutics and Astronautics at Stanford University for 14 years. He is responsible for developing the curriculum for students interested in designing, building and operating small space experiments.
He helped develop the original concepts for the CricketSat, CanSat, CubeSat and the PocketQub for educational applications for use in space from using party balloons for fun to real rocket launches into earth orbiting space. In 2010 he was selected as by the Space News publication as one of 10 space professionals “That Made a Difference in Space”. One of his recent publications is as a coauthor of the article “Citizen Satellites” in the February 2011 Scientific American. Bob has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Idaho and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.