Dave Korsmeyer, "Big Numbers for Small Missions: NASA's Future with Cubesats"

A new paradigm for NASA spacecraft has recently begun to take hold, building upon the intersection of advanced commercial technologies, secondary launch opportunities, and very-small packaging -- the "Cubesat". Although the Cubesat was originally designed as an educational framework to teach spacecraft engineering at universities, this spacecraft format has ushered in a new era of low-cost scientific spacecraft. Since 2006, NASA Ames has launched more than 14 Cubesats, and has plans to launch another 14 next year alone. In this talk, I will describe how NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative enables low-cost, rapid access to space, while supporting high-performance missions in Earth orbit and beyond.

Dr. Dave Korsmeyer is the Director of Engineering at NASA Ames Research Center. He previously was the Chief of the NASA Ames Intelligent Systems Division from 2003-2012. Dave was the lead of the NEO (Near-earth Object) mission concepts study for NASA, directly supported President Obama's 2009 Human Space Flight Review, and was part of the Human Spaceflight Architecture Team's Technology Panel. Dave received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State, his M.S. and Ph.D. in Astrodynamics from the University of Texas at Austin. Dave is also a Sloan Fellow with a Master's in Business Management from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.