The Orekit team is happy to welcome a new PMC member: Massimo Casasco (@mcasasco)
Following Guillermo Ortega’s retirement, Massimo Casasco has been elected by the Project Management Committee (PMC) as the new representative of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) of the European Space Agency.
Massimo’s nomination will ensure continued representation and active participation from ESTEC in our activities.
Massimo has been working as Head of the Guidance, Navigation, and Control Section within the Systems Engineering Department at ESTEC for the past six years.
Before this role, he worked at ESA as a Guidance, Navigation, and Control Systems Engineer for the BepiColombo mission to Mercury, and also acted as Technical Officer for various R&D studies and technology developments in the field of GNC.
Earlier in his career, he held several positions in European academia and industry in the domains of AOCS and GNC for spacecraft and aircraft.
Massimo is highly familiar with Orekit, having previously overseen the development of its semi-analytical orbit propagation module - the Draper Semi-analytical Satellite Theory (DSST) - as part of an ESA contract under his supervision.
The updated list of Orekit PMC members as of 2025-06-18 is, therefore :
- Anne-Olivia Biramben (CS Group)
- Massimo Casasco (European Space Agency - ESTEC)
- Bryan Cazabonne (Airbus Defence & Space)
- Paul Cefola (University at Buffalo)
- Sébastien Dinot (CS Group)
- Frank Dreger (European Space Agency - ESOC)
- Hank Grabowski (Independent Expert)
- Sébastien Herbinière (Safran Data Systems)
- Petrus Hyvönen (Swedish Space Corporation)
- Yannick Jeandroz (Airbus Defence and Space)
- Maxime Journot (CS Group)
- Christophe Le Bris (Thales Alenia Space)
- Stéphanie Lizy-Destrez (ISAE)
- Luc Maisonobe (Thales Alenia Space)
- Mark Rutten (InTrack Solutions)
- Romain Serra (Exotrail)
- Evan Ward (Naval Research Laboratory)
A warm welcome to Massimo !!! 
And a happy retirement to Guillermo !
