Steve Labrecque

CTO

Steve has an extensive background in electronics design, assembly and testing, instrumentation systems, and sensor engineering, assembly and testing.   He has broad experience with space hardware, major telescope instrument projects and ship-based instrumentation systems.

As Chief Technology Officer, Steve is responsible for the overall execution of Ecliptic's contracted work, including ledership of the technical staff and influencing the allocation of internal company resources to meet the cost, schedule, performance and risk targets of each contract.  He coordinates activity between projects relating to integration and testing, and also leads the planning and execution of the firm's R&D efforts and is responsible for strategic decisions on facility issues.

A founding Ecliptic employee, he was Director of Production for the firm's first ten years and VP of Engineering for three years.

Before Ecliptic, Steve was a camera engineer at BlastOff Corporation, a commercial deep-space mission firm.  Before BlastOff, he worked for ten years at JPL and Caltech as an instrument and electronics engineer, contributing to such projects as the NEAT telescope CCD sensor, STRV-1D tech demo spacecraft, Mars Orbital Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, Keck Telescope LIRIS instrument, Antarctic research instrumentation, and several other demanding projects.

For six years in the 1980s Steve was a senior electronics technician at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, where he did circuit and software design for ship-borne sonar instruments and maintenance and operation of scientific equipment.

Main-belt asteroid 19379 Labrecque (1998 BR7) is named after Steve for his work supporting JPL's NEAT telescope project. He has also been awarded multiple commendations from NASA's Space Shuttle program for his work on the Shuttle External Tank Video System.

• A.A.S. in Electronics Technology at Southern Maine Vocational Technical Institute (South Portland)