National Space Society governor Jeff Greason is the winner of the Society’s 2016 Space Pioneer Award for Entrepreneurial Business. This award recognizes Jeff’s successes in founding and helping manage and direct technical work at XCOR and other entrepreneurial space companies. It also recognizes his bold spirit in founding Agile Aero, Inc., a new company that will seek to break through a rapid prototyping barrier that has slowed aerospace development for the last several decades.
Jeff will accept the award on May 21 at the National Space Society’s 2016 International Space Development Conference® (isdc2016.nss.org). This will be the 35th ISDC and will be held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel and Casino. The conference will run from May 18-22, 2016.
Jeff presented a memorable speech regarding the future of space settlement at the 2011 ISDC in Huntsville. That speech (with transcript) can be viewed here and has over 11,000 views so far: www.nss.org/resources/library/videos/ISDC11greason.html.
About the Space Pioneer Award
The Space Pioneer Award consists of a silvery pewter Moon globe cast by the Baker Art Foundry in Placerville, California, from a sculpture originally created by Don Davis, the well-known space and astronomical artist. The globe, as shown at left, which represents multiple space mission destinations and goals, sits freely on a brass support with a wooden base and brass plaque, which are created by Michael Hall’s Studio Foundry of Driftwood, TX. NSS has several different categories under which the award is presented each year, starting in 1988. Some of the recent winners of Space Pioneer Awards include Elon Musk, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bigelow, citizen astronaut Anouseh Ansari, Dr. Kip Thorne, and the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta mission team.
About Jeff Greason
Jeff Greason sits on the NSS Board of Governors and is a recent co-founder and new CEO of Agile Aero, Inc., a company targeting rapid prototyping capabilities for aerospace vehicles. Jeff’s achievements include being one of the four co-founders of XCOR (where he is also a board member) and leading the engineering team that developed ten different long-life, highly-reusable liquid-fueled rocket engines, a low-cost liquid propellant piston pump, and two manned reusable rocket aircraft – the EZ-Rocket and other similar vehicles. Agile Aero (www.agile.aero), which he recently founded with several other XCOR employees, is intended to help speed up the typically long vehicle development process which strains the finances and resources of many aerospace companies. He expects the results to aid other aerospace companies in making their visions a reality. The company is located in Midland, TX. Jeff was also a member of the President’s Human Space Flight Review (Augustine II) Committee in 2009.
