Presenter: NASA Innovations in Space Communications and Navigation: The Decade of Light

Jim Schier is the Chief Architect and Deputy Director of System Engineering for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation Program at NASA Headquarters. He leads NASA and international studies on the evolution of NASA’s space communications networks to meet the needs of future science and human exploration missions. He joined NASA in 2004 after 25 years in industry where he worked on civil, defense, intelligence, and commercial space systems. At Northrop Grumman, he supported re-architecting the National Reconnaissance Office’s ground systems, led system engineering on commercial satellite systems including Iridium and Thuraya, and was a lead system engineer on the Orbital Space Plane. Mr. Schier was Chief System Engineer on the International Space Station at Grumman. At TRW, he managed flight software development on the MILSTAR Communications Satellite and led integration of materials processing experiments for the 1985 Shuttle Spacelab 3 mission. He received a Silver Snoopy award for his work on Spacelab 3 and a NASA Administrator’s Group Award for the team that redesigned the Space Station. In 2015, he was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal “for exceptional service and exemplary leadership in creating NASA's future Space Communications and Navigation Architecture.”