Rex Ridenoure, CEO and Co-founder, Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation, Pasadena and Silicon Valley

Ecliptic is a 16 year-old privately held space avionics and sensor systems firm.  Rex is responsible for Ecliptic's financial results and for coordinating the firm's overall corporate strategy, business-development, partnering and branding initiatives. He also helps shape R&D planning and selectively contributes to various technical contracts.  Ecliptic is the world’s leading supplier of rugged video systems used on rockets and spacecraft—its  RocketCam™ product family—and is known globally for providing iconic onboard views from over 140 space missions, many of them pioneering and historic.  Ecliptic also produces space avionics for the control and data handling of science payloads and space-based experiments, develops selected spacecraft subsystems and performs integration and testing of very small spacecraft called CubeSats (e.g., LightSail 1 and LightSail 2). 

For the first half of his 38-year space career Rex was a space-mission engineer and space-mission architect, working on more than a dozen missions, including Viking/Mars (as a student intern at JPL); some of the earliest communications satellites deployed from the Space Shuttle (at Hughes Space & Communications); the Hubble Space Telescope (at Lockheed); Voyager/Neptune, Lunar Observer pre-project and Deep Space One (at JPL); and several small-satellite and secondary payload studies.  For the past 19 years he has been a ‘NewSpace’ entrepreneur and a champion of expanding commercial space activities beyond the established commercial markets.  During this period as a senior manager and space-mission architect at Microcosm, SpaceDev, BlastOff Corporation and Ecliptic he has actively promoted the broad prospects for small satellites, and in particular the emerging market for commercial deep-space missions.

Rex earned his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering (with honors) at Iowa State University (Ames), where he was also a 4-year NCAA gymnast.  He also has a M.S. in Aeronautics from Caltech.  He presents and lectures often on commercial space initiatives and space entrepreneurship.

Throughout his career, Rex has been fortunate to have participated in and contributed to a variety of pioneering space projects and space firsts, and to several space trends still in the news today (with dates of his participation shown):

1976:  First successful Mars landings (Viking)

1978:  First commercial satellites deployed from Space Shuttle (deployed on STS-5, 1982)

1980-1982:  Commercial Payload Specialist/commercial crew development (Hubble Space Telescope)

1982-1985:  First ‘Shuttle-optimized’ spacecraft program (LEASAT; 5 satellites)

1986:  Shuttle Get Away Special experiments (Utah State University)

1986:  Early commercial small satellites (GlobeSat, Inc.)

1986-1990:  First encounter with Neptune (Voyager 2); Voyager Interstellar Mission planning (both)

1987-1992:  Low-cost student-designed secondary payloads (SURFSat, launched 1992)

1990:  First detailed mission plan for a Mercury orbiter (inspired MESSENGER mission)

1990-1991:  Planning for lunar mapping in advance of human return (Lunar Observer)

1992-1994:  Early smallsat and microsat studies for deep-space exploration

1994-1995:  Formulation of NASA tech-demo spacecraft series (New Millennium Program)

1995-1997:  First mission to use ion propulsion as primary propulsion system (Deep Space 1)

1998:  First – and still only! – successful commercial mission to Moon (AsiaSat-3/HGS-1)

1998-1999:  Early commercial asteroid, lunar and Mars mission concepts (SpaceDev, Inc.)

2000:  Mature commercial lunar lander/rover development (BlastOff! Corporation)

2001-present:  Expanded use of onboard video from rockets and spacecraft (Ecliptic RocketCam™)

                           (Delta, Atlas, Shuttle, SpaceShipOne, LCROSS, Cygnus, etc. -- ~140 missions)

2008:  Google Lunar XPRIZE team (Southern California Selene Group); spinning lander architecture

2015-present:  Advanced sensor development (Remote Acoustic Sensor)