FLIGHT OPPORTUNITIES COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE WEBINAR
Achieving Small Business Goals through Flight Testing Space Tech
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 | 10am-11am PDT
Speakers
- Solange Massa, M.D. Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Ecoatoms, Inc.
- Apostolos “Laki” Vlachos, Senior Payload Integration Manager, Blue Origin
Abstract
Join us on May 1 to learn about Ecoatoms, Inc.’s batch coating of biosensors payload that flew on Blue Origin’s New Shepard reusable suborbital rocket system in December 2023.
Principal investigator Solange Massa will speak to how she leveraged her TechFlights award to rapidly expand Ecoatoms – a small business that designs and builds space payloads to manufacture biomedical products. In discussion with Flight Opportunities personnel, Dr. Massa and Laki Vlachos from Blue Origin will explore both the value of the flight test as well as lessons learned, highlighting how commercial suborbital flight testing can support the maturation of technologies for commercial impact.
Flight Opportunities encourages the community to engage in these conversations, and participants are welcome to submit questions prior to the webinar to enable more directed responses. Please send questions to nasa-flightopportunities@mail.nasa.gov.
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Speaker Bios
Solange Massa, M.D. Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Ecoatoms, a company developing space biomedical payloads. She was previously the lead investment fellow at Life Science Angels and is currently a member at the same group. Before that, she did her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University developing biomaterials for radiation-induced diseases. During her doctoral research at Harvard-MIT HST, she developed award-winning Organ-on-a-Chip platforms for drug toxicity testing. For this work, she was named MIT Innovator Under 35 and Women at the Frontier. Her work has been featured in TEDx, MIT Technology Review, BBC, Wired, and numerous scientific journals.
Apostolos “Laki” Vlachos is a senior payload integration manager at Blue Origin. He’s responsible for the planning, scheduling, and execution of customer payload integration into the New Shepard system, acting as the primary customer interface in safety and integration reviews. In addition, he participates in process improvement initiatives, writes and maintains payload documentation, and conducts safety and mission assurance processes. With a strong mixture of technical and leadership experience, he is adept at transforming technical issues into actionable plans that meet cost and schedule constraints.
