Firefly Aerospace competitors

Kathy J. Warden is an American business executive who serves as chief executive officer and president of Northrop Grumman, as of 2019.

Elon Reeve Musk (born June 28, 1971) is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. With an estimated net worth of around US$243 billion as of February 2022, Musk is the wealthiest person in the world according to both the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Forbes real-time billionaires list.

Tory Bruno (born November 3, 1961 as Salvatore Thomas Bruno) is an American aerospace engineer, rocket scientist and executive. He has been the CEO of United Launch Alliance (ULA) since August 2014. Before ULA, he worked at Lockheed Martin, where he made the transition from engineer to executive.

Sean Mahoney is a Board Member at Commercial Spaceflight Federat and Chief Executive Officer at Masten Space Systems.

Shey Sabripour is the founder and CEO of CesiumAstro, Inc. Shey has nearly three decades of leadership success in design, development and execution of LEO and GEO telecommunication satellites, launch vehicles, and other interplanetary space vehicles. During his 24 years of continuous career with Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Shey served as a design engineer, technology innovator, program manager and ultimately, the Director of Spacecraft Design responsible for an organization of 370 engineers, scientists, and business professionals in missions ranging from $100M to $1B. From 2001 through 2005 Shey served as the Director of Agile Payload Program, where he led a multidisciplinary team for design, development, qualification and successful flight of the first Lockheed Martin Commercial Active Phased Array Payload. His last program at Lockheed Martin was in the design, development, qualification and production of the United States Navy’s first MUOS communication satellite. Shey was recognized 14 times by Lockheed Martin Corporation as a visionary innovator and program leader. He was named person of the year in 2005 at Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems. From September of 2014 to December of 2016, Shey served as the CTO for Firefly Space Systems, a startup rocket company in Austin Texas. In that role, Shey was responsible for technical and program management of the Alpha Rocket. He was instrumental in growing the small team of 11 engineers to more than 160 in 2016. His team successfully bid and won the NASA VCLS mission and two DARPA contracts at Firefly. Shey earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from North Dakota State University in 1985. He has pursued continuing education in both electrical engineering and executive business management at institutions such as New Jersey Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, Santa Clara University, University of Maryland and Lockheed Martin Center for Leadership excellence. In 2000, Shey co-authored the Spacecraft Power Technologies textbook and is currently completing the Fundamentals of Communications Satellites textbook for World Scientific Press. Shey holds two issued and two pending US Patents. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Michael T. Suffredini is President, CEO and co-founder of Axiom Space, Inc. The Axiom Space vision is to make living and working in Earth orbit commonplace as a means to a robust economy in low Earth orbit. To realize this vision, Axiom is building the world’s first internationally available commercial space station to continue what the International Space Station (ISS) community of Nations has begun. Mr. Suffredini has 30+ years of experience in human spaceflight, and served as NASA’s ISS Program manager for a decade prior to his retirement in late 2015. As ISS Program manager, Mike was responsible for the development, assembly, operation and utilization of the 460-metric ton, permanently manned international orbiting laboratory complex. The 15-nation program is the largest international peacetime project in human history. During his tenure, Mr. Suffredini successfully lead the transition of the ISS program from a development and assembly focus to a research and commercial utilization focus, opening avenues for a new commercial marketplace in space. Mr. Suffredini is the recipient of numerous awards including the NASA Distinguished Service medal, the NASA Outstanding Leadership medal, the National Air and Space Museum Trophy and the Yuri Gagarin Medal. In addition, Michael has had both the Rank of Meritorious Executive and Rank of Distinguished Executive conferred on him by the President of the United States.