As vice president of the Build and Flight Reliability Team at SpaceX, Hans Koenigsmann leads the company’s quality engineering and process development teams; oversees the launch readiness process during launch campaigns; and assesses launch risks, identifying and resolving anomalies during integration and launch.

He has more than 25 years of experience designing, developing, and building complex avionics and guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems for launch vehicles and satellites. At SpaceX since the company’s inception in 2002, he has built up the avionics, software, and GNC departments and developed the launch readiness process used during each launch campaign. He designed the company’s risk mitigation process and initiated the risk database, establishing a similar process for system-level changes to the vehicle and ground systems. He was the chief avionics architect of the Falcon 1 and early Falcon 9 efforts, and launch chief engineer for the last three Falcon 1 missions and most of the Falcon 9 flights.

His experience includes the development of two suborbital and two orbital launchers as well as several satellite projects and attitude control systems. He headed the Space Technology Division of Germany’s Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen, where he was responsible for the development and operation of the satellite BREM-SAT. He then worked for Microcosm as chief scientist and flight systems manager for their suborbital vehicles.

Dr. Koenigsmann has a PhD in aerospace engineering and production from the University of Bremen and an MS in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Berlin.