Rex Ridenoure
Rex Ridenoure is CEO and a co-founder of Ecliptic Enterprises Corporation, one of the cosponsors of Space Investment Summit 5. Among other endeavors, Ecliptic is the world’s leading supplier of onboard video systems for use with rockets and spacecraft. Ecliptic’s popular RocketCam™ product family produces onboard views from each Space Shuttle launch (including the now famous foam-falling footage), views onboard SpaceShipOne during its X PRIZE-winning flights in 2004, and compelling views onboard dozens of other launches of Delta and Atlas launch vehicles. Rex’s technical background is in space mission architecting and engineering, spacecraft systems and mission planning. Since 1980, he has been a champion of and active participant in the emerging market sector of private and commercial space missions and practices in Earth orbit, to the Moon and beyond, and since 1985 has been an active member of the small satellite community. For the first 20 years of his career while working at Hughes, Lockheed and JPL, Rex made significant technical contributions to more than a dozen pioneering space projects and studies such as Viking (Mars), several of the earliest Shuttle-launched communications satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, Voyager 2 (Neptune), the Lunar Observer pre-project, SURFSat, Deep Space 1 and many other efforts. On the Hubble project, he was co-organizer in 1980 of a proposed Lockheed corporate astronaut office and also served as a space-suited test subject for Hubble in-orbit servicing simulations. In the late 1990s he successfully transitioned into the entrepreneurial space arena. He was co-recipient with three other engineers of a 1999 Aviation Week & Space Technology Magazine Laurel Award for playing a key role in the 1998 salvage of the stranded HGS-1 comsat, using a novel orbit method that made HGS-1 the first commercial spacecraft to reach the Moon's distance. From 1998-2000 Rex was Chief Mission Architect at SpaceDev, one of the first commercial space-exploration and development companies. During 2000-2001 he was Chief Mission Architect and VP for Commercial Payloads at BlastOff! Corporation, which made the most progress to date toward sending the first commercial spacecraft to the surface of the Moon. Since co-founding Pasadena-based Ecliptic in 2001, he has directed the firm’s strategic planning and partnering, business development, marketing and sales. Ecliptic’s popular RocketCam™ product family is the world’s leading brand of onboard video systems for use with rockets and spacecraft. Ecliptic-supplied hardware will be controlling all nine imaging sensors onboard NASA’s LCROSS lunar mission, including live video from a RocketCam camera. LCROSS aims in early 2009 to impact a spent rocket stage into the shadowed craters of the lunar pole in a bold attempt to confirm the existence of postulated water ice there. Rex earned his M.S. in Aeronautics from Caltech and B.S. in Aerospace Engineering (Cum Laude) from Iowa State University (Ames).