Hi dear Orekit community,
As some of you may already know, after 21 years working at CS Group, I will be leaving the company this evening. A large part of my day job was to work on Orekit, which I created. This included designing new features, writing code, debugging, validating, maintaining the great community, answering questions on the forum.
This has been tremendously rewarding. You as a community really are the people that made it worth doing along all these years.
I will continue to work in the space field (those who know me know that I’m too passionate to leave space). I will from now on work in the navigation team at Thales Alenia Space. My job at TAS will not be related to Orekit anymore. Nevertheless, I cannot leave my brainchild, so I will still remain close to Orekit. I will still be on the forum answering questions, I will still contribute to code and the PMC accepted to keep me as a member. This will however only be as a benevolent working from home during my personal time. I will not represent TAS in this area (TAS already has a representative in the PMC, and this will not change). This means I will probably answer much slower than before on the forum and the amount of code I will write, both for developing new features and fixing bugs, will be reduced.
The Orekit community is great and healthy, so I am confident it will continue to work smoothly. The Orekit team at CS remains very active, Pascal and Maxime will lead it perfectly, I have full confidence on them. The Orekit team outside of CS remains very active too. This is one of the great benefit of open-source: the projects are safe from people and company changes.
I really really want to thank the community for all these years, it has been a marvelous journey with you all.