Bruce Pittman

Senior Vice President & Senior Operating Officer of the National Space Society

Bruce Pittman is currently filling the role of Senior Vice President & Senior Operating Officer of the National Space Society.

Bruce Pittman is the founder and president of Profit Engineering Technologies and is currently working as a contractor at NASA as the Director of Flight Projects and Chief System Engineer in the NASA Space Portal and the Emerging Space Office at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. In this position Mr. Pittman supports programs ranging from suborbital human-tended research; orbital applications of the International Space Station and other orbiting commercial facilities; low cost, reliable access to space, reusable space infrastructure as well as cis-lunar commercialization. He has been involved in high technology project development, project management and system engineering in a variety of industries for over 30 years.

Mr. Pittman started his career working as a civil servant at NASA Ames for 11 years on a number of space projects including Pioneer Venus, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), the Cryogenic Grating Spectrometer on the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, the Space Station Freedom Technology Advocacy Group, and several advanced studies programs including Study Manager for the Large Deployable Reflector.

Mr. Pittman has also been a founder and member of the startup team in a number of early growth companies including SpaceHab, Kistler Aerospace, New Focus, Product Factory, Prometheus II Ltd. and Industrial Sound and Motion. As a consultant Mr. Pittman has worked with many Fortune 500 companies including Westinghouse, Northrop Grumman, Varian, Texas Instruments, TRW and Boeing as well as government agencies including NASA and DOE.

Mr. Pittman has a BS in Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering from U. C. Davis and a MS in Engineering Management from Santa Clara University. Mr. Pittman is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and is the chairman of the AIAA Commercial Space Group. He was also the founder and first chairman of the AIAA System Engineering Technical Committee. Mr. Pittman is a member of the executive committee for the Space Investment Summit Coalition and is co-founder and president of the Silicon Valley Space Club. In 2012 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Space Society. He has authored or co-authored over 3 dozen papers on a technical, management and business topics in aerospace and high technology. He has co-authored two book chapters in Beyond The Earth: The Future of Humans in Space and Space Commerce: The Inside Story. In addition to his technical work Mr. Pittman has also been a member of the adjunct faculty in the Graduate Engineering School at Santa Clara University for over 25 years.

For his technical work Mr. Pittman has been awarded 2 NASA Special Achievement Awards, four NASA Group Achievement Awards. In 2011 NASA award him the Exceptional Public Service Medal for “exceptional leadership in pioneering the development of commercial space for public benefit.” In 2012 he was presented with the “Service to the Frontier” award by the Space Frontier Foundation.