Khoa Vo

Khoa Vo serves as chief of the Spaceport Technologies Office in Exploration Research and Technology Programs at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In this role, he is responsible for leading a team of researchers at Kennedy’s Swamp Works, a lean development, rapid innovation environment with partners across NASA, industry and academia. The Spaceport Technologies Office is developing spaceport and surface technologies to enable NASA’s human exploration mission to the Moon and Mars.

Vo also serves as the manager of NASA’s Human Landing System (HLS) Ground Operations Office at Kennedy. In this additional role, Vo is responsible for leading the team to oversee lander ground operations at the launch site for the first human lunar lander since the Apollo era, which will put the first woman and next man on the Moon.

Experience

Prior to his current assignment, Vo was part of a cohort of 18 individuals from agencies across the federal government selected in 2018 to be part of the White House Leadership Development Program. Sponsored by the Executive Office of the President (EOP), the program aims to strengthen enterprise leadership across the government by providing senior level federal employees with expanded perspective and skillsets to address challenges facing the country. As a White House Leadership Fellow, Vo spent a year at the White House working on the Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals from the President’s Management Agenda, the administration’s long-term vision for creating a more modern and effective government.

Vo also held various positions within the Engineering Directorate at Kennedy. He was the chief of the Hardware Systems Branch, where he managed a team of engineers providing network and computer engineering expertise to various programs at the Florida spaceport. Prior to that, he was the technical integration manager for the Control and Data Systems Division. In that capacity, Vo led and coordinated the Engineering Directorate’s implementation of command and control capabilities at Kennedy for the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

Vo began his professional career at Kennedy Space Center in 1999 supporting the Space Shuttle Program as a software engineer, before becoming a space shuttle operations engineer.

Education

Vo earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Central Florida and a master’s in software engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology.

Biography last updated February 2020