Lisa Valencia is a Project Manager, Systems Engineer, and Electrical Engineer. She worked at NASA for 35 years, 29 as a civil servant and 6 as a consultant. She has worked on a variety of missions including satellites, rockets, rovers, the space shuttle, and many others. She is most known for her pioneering role in NASA’s Autonomous Flight Termination System (AFTS). AFTS autonomously makes flight termination decisions, greatly reducing the cost of each launch due to the decreased need for ground-based assets.

Lisa has recently worked with the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) community on several rocket launches and the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) payload on Firefly’s successful Blue Ghost Lunar Lander. Lisa has also been a US delegate to the United Nations Committee for the Peaceful Use of Outer Space Internation Committee for GNSS for the past six years.