June 2025 Chapter Meeting
Date and Time:
Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM EST
Dinner provided by INCOSE-Orlando Chapter Members
Eventbrite Tickets Required:
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Location:
One Resource Square/SAIC Building, 13501 Ingenuity Dr., Ste 232, Orlando (Building Doors Lock at 7pm)
Go to Rocket Technology, Inc. (2nd Floor, left from elevators, right down the hall)
About this Event:
Dinner and Networking: 5:30
Dinner is provided by the INCOSE Orlando Chapter.
Featured Presentation: 6:30
About the Presentation: Dr. Markusic describes his personal journey from an Ohio farm to landing on the moon. He highlights incremental accomplishments and lessons learned from academics, government civil service, and the commercial sector - culminating in starting his own “newspace” companies. Dr. Markusic has spent the last few decades leading the development of modern spacecraft and rockets. “Newspace” will have a broad impact on 21st century corporate engineering and human space exploration. The combination of low-cost, fast-moving methodologies of newspace and artificial intelligence will transform how businesses work in space.
About the Presenter: Dr. Tom Markusic is an American rocket scientist and space tech entrepreneur. He founded Firefly Aerospace, where he led the company to develop spacecraft and rockets that have gone to space and will soon land on the moon. The company continues to rapidly grow its revenue through high-value government and commercial contracts, and a strategic partnership to develop next generation rockets with Northrop Grumman.
Tom has a broad background in the space industry. At the US Air Force and NASA he worked in advanced propulsion research and program management. He served in senior positions at several emerging space companies: SpaceX (Principal Propulsion Engineer, Director of Texas Rocket Development Site), Blue Origin (Senior Systems Engineer), and Virgin Galactic (VP of Propulsion). He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. Tom recently founded GigEngineer, which aims to disrupt the traditional approach to engineering and production to ultimately lower the cost and increase the speed of product engineering, while also introducing synergistic methods to operations technology. “Gig” will accomplish this by changing how companies interface with external engineering services and by fundamentally changing how the engineering and production operations work itself is done.
Practical SE Series: 7:30
Networking and Group Discussions: 8:00