FLIGHT OPPORTUNITIES COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE WEBINAR
Exploring Hosted Orbital Capabilities with NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program
September 3, 2025
Speakers
- Danielle McCulloch, Program Executive, NASA’s Flight Opportunities program
- Anh Nguyen, Program Portfolio Integrator, NASA’s Flight Opportunities program
Abstract
NASA’s Flight Opportunities program — which has long served the agency by providing access to suborbital flight testing with commercial providers — added a new capability in its most recent flight services contract award: hosting payloads in orbit. On hosted orbital tests, the flight provider manages integration, launch, and mission operations, allowing researchers to focus on developing their payload (i.e., their technology, experiment, or instrument). Hosted orbital flights offer researchers an important capability within the flight test continuum, serving as an alternative to flights aboard the International Space Station or building/procuring their own spacecraft.
During this session, Flight Opportunities personnel explore the benefits of commercial hosted orbital flights. For example, the flight cadence of hosted opportunities could decrease time to flight, as some providers offer multi-customer hosted missions at regular intervals as a core part of their business model. As demand grows, providers intend to increase the number of regularly scheduled hosted missions. Additionally, researchers can leverage commercial best practices and capabilities. Presenters share their expertise in preparing payloads for hosted orbital flight tests.
Speaker Bios:
Danielle McCulloch is the program executive for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program within the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. In this role, she provides strategic integration between researchers, mission stakeholders, and flight providers, as well as other NASA programs, to maximize impact for technology advancement and ensure that the researcher community is actively engaged in available flight test opportunities. She comes to this position after serving as both the program manager and deputy program manager for Flight Opportunities. Before joining NASA, Danielle held various leadership roles in the medical device and paper manufacturing industries and was vice president for a small technology transfer consultancy. Danielle’s experience underlines her passion for innovation, entrepreneurship, and fostering vibrant researcher communities.
Anh Nguyen, Ph.D., is currently the program portfolio integrator for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology and Flight Opportunities programs and the campaign manager for the Flight Opportunities program’s hosted orbital flights. Anh has worked on a variety of CubeSat and suborbital flight tests during her career at NASA over the past 10 years. She has a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from University of Florida’s Precision Space Systems Laboratory with a focus on dynamic systems and controls, and she is passionate about rapidly demonstrating new space technologies.
