Ecliptic: Systems for Accessing and Experiencing Space and Other Extreme Environments

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Ecliptic Management Profiles

Rex Ridenoure

President and CEO

Distinguished career as a space-mission engineer and system architect on more than a dozen space missions. A champion of and leader in the emerging market sector of commercial deep-space missions. Officer and Ecliptic co-founder.

Rex is responsible for coordinating Ecliptic's overall corporate strategy and partnering efforts and leads the firm's business-development, marketing and sales initiatives. He also shapes R&D planning and selectively contributes to various technical contracts.

Before Ecliptic, Rex was Chief Mission Architect at BlastOff! Corporation working on commercial lunar missions and, before that, Chief Mission Architect at SpaceDev, a commercial space-exploration and development company. Before SpaceDev, he was manager of the Space Systems Division at Microcosm, Inc., a small space-mission engineering firm.

He was co-recipient of the 2002 AIAA Space Systems Award for key contributions to the NASA/JPL New Millennium Deep Space One mission. In 1999, he was co-recipient with three other engineers of a Laurel Award (the aerospace "Oscar") from Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine for playing a key role in the salvage of the HGS-1 comsat, using a method that made HGS-1 the first commercial spacecraft to reach the Moon's distance. He enjoyed a distinguished career at JPL for 11 years as a mission and systems engineer, holding lead engineering roles on the pioneering, ion-propelled Deep Space One project, the New Millennium Program of advanced spacecraft, the Lunar Observer pre-project, the Voyager Neptune encounter, and the ultra-low-cost Caltech/JPL SURFSAT project. Also at JPL, Rex managed several initiatives addressing low-cost deep-space missions using microspacecraft. Before JPL, he was a research engineer at Utah State University on small, low-cost satellites, a mission and systems engineer at Hughes Space and Communications on several telecommunications satellites, and a Crew Systems engineer at Lockheed on the Hubble Space Telescope . In the latter capacity, he was co-organizer of a proposed Lockheed corporate astronaut office and also served as a space-suited test subject for Hubble in-orbit servicing simulations. In 1986 he taught space systems design at Utah State University.

  • M.S. in Aeronautics at Caltech.
  • B.S. in Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University (Ames).

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