Space Operations: Inspiring Humankind's Future

Hélène Pasquier is a ground systems operations expert in the Operations department at CNES (French Space Agency). She has been the head of Generic Ground Systems Section in the Products and Grounds Systems Department, leading the development of generic and reusable Monitoring & Control software systems, which is a part of CNES Mission Operations Systems. She is acting in research & technology studies and coordinates the use of the international standards (ECSS, CCSDS Mission Operations and Cross Support Services) within the Mission Operations Systems developed by the Operations department.
Hélène graduated in Computer Science Engineering from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, France (ENSIMAG, INPG).

Craig Cruzen is a Payload Operations Director for the International Space Station (ISS) Program at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama, USA, where he and his colleagues lead a ground control team in performing science operations onboard the ISS.

Mr. Cruzen joined NASA in 1990 as a launch trajectory analyst and later served as an ascent guidance engineer.  He also was a lead developer of NASA’s Automated Rendezvous and Capture technology development project.  In 2000, Craig transitioned to MSFC’s Mission Operations Laboratory where he certified as a Payload Rack Officer and a Timeline Change Officer in support of ISS real-time science operations.  Mr. Cruzen was selected to be a Payload Operation Director in 2003 and served on console until 2009.  From 2009-2012 he was the flight operations lead for NASA’s Ares launch vehicle development program.  Craig returned to the operations directors’ office in 2013 and was named training lead in 2015. 
Mr. Cruzen was born in Flint, Michigan and claims Flushing, Michigan as his home town.  He graduated from Flushing High School in 1987 and earned a B.S. in aerospace engineering from the University ofMichigan in Ann Arbor in 1992.

Michael Schmidhuber is employed at the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Currently he is responsible for the ground system engineering for geostationary projects, especially ESA’s new data-relay satellite system (EDRS) that is operated from GSOC. He has worked in flight dynamics, mission operations and system development for various LEO and GEO satellite projects since 1994. Among his activities are establishing of intranet sites for operations and the application of virtualization in the control room environment.

Mr. Schmidhuber was born and grew up in Munich, Germany. The interest in spaceflight and astronomy goes back to the early seventies and was influenced strongly by the Apollo era. He graduated in Aerospace Engineering in 1994 at the Technical University of Munich. After several space-related post-diploma jobs he joined a contractor company to work for mission operations at DLR. In 2006 he became a staff member with DLR.

Young H. Lee is the Advanced Design Engineering Technical Group Supervisor and Project Support Lead in the Project Systems Engineering and Formulation Section in Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is currently supporting the Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) program office in the area of mission analysis in coordinating a variety of mission studies that support the advocacy of new RPS for future solar system exploration. 

Over the last ten years, she has held many diverse leadership positions in NASA programs and projects establishing strategic and collaborative working relationships across many organizations within NASA, including its partners. In addition, she has over twenty years of experience in the development and deployment of operations systems for deep space missions, focusing on operations cost reduction, user-productivity improvements and increased information throughput in support of many NASA deep space missions.