Tommaso Sgobba

Tommaso Sgobba is Executive Director and Board Secretary of IAASS (International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety). Tommaso Sgobba has been IAASS first President in the period 2005-2013. Until June 2013 Tommaso Sgobba has been responsible for flight safety at the European Space Agency (ESA), including human-rated systems, spacecraft re-entries, space debris, use of nuclear power sources, and planetary protection. He joined the European Space Agency in 1989, after 13 years in the aeronautical industry. Initially he supported the developments of the Ariane 5 launcher, several earth observation and meteorological satellites, and the early phase of the European Hermes spaceplane. Later he became _Product Assurance and Safety Manager for all European manned missions on Shuttle, MIR station, and for the European research facilities of the International Space Station. He chaired for 10 years the ESA ISS Payload Safety Review Panel. He was also instrumental in setting up the ESA Re-entry Safety Review Panel. Tommaso Sgobba holds an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin (Italy), where he was also professor of space system safety (1999-2001). He has published several articles and papers on space safety, and co-edited the text book "Safety Design for Space Systems�, published in 2009 by Elsevier, that was also published later in Chinese. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the books "Safety Design for Space Operations� (2013) and "Space Safety and Human Performance� (2017) also published by Elsevier. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of Space Safety Engineering and member of the editorial board of the Space Safety Magazine. Tommaso Sgobba is the inventor (patent pending) of the R-DBAS (Re-entry, Direct Broadcasting Alert System), to alert the air traffic of falling fragments from uncontrolled space system re-entry. Tommaso Sgobba received the NASA recognition for outstanding contribution to the International Space Station in 2004, and the prestigious NASA Space Flight Awareness (SFA) Award in 2007.