Faculty and Staff
Pablo de León
Pablo de León has almost two decades as an aerospace engineer with experience in
space project management and space suit design and Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVA).
He is currently a Senior Research Associate in the area of extravehicular activities
and space suit design at the Department of Space Studies, University of North Dakota,
in Grand Forks. He is also preparing a new course on Human Spaceflight for UND,
and working as project manager of a NASA-funded program on planetary space suit
design.
Prior to that, he worked with the Space Shuttle as payload manager and general designer
of the Project PADE (G-761) science experiments package. These experiments completed
all NASA certifications and flew on mission STS-108 to the International Space Station
in December 2001.This project carried seven experiments and performed flawlessly
during the 12 day space flight.
His prior experience was as chief designer and fabrications manager for several,
underwater-simulation, (EVA) analog, pressure suit systems. Pablo has flown, as
payload specialist, in the NASA KC-135 aircraft more than 80 weightless parabolas
carrying four Zero-G fluid dynamics experiments.
As writer, Pablo has published several books and reports about space, with a special
interest in manned space flight. One of these books entitled "108 Minutes in Space"
documents the first flight of a human in space. He founded a magazine of space exploration,
and is currently editor in chief of the "Latin-American Journal of Space Science
and Technology". Pablo has written more than 35 technical papers on space engineering
and life support systems presented at international congresses. He belongs to a
number of professional aerospace engineering societies. He was selected Regent of
the United Societies in Space (USIS) in 2000. During 2000 he was co-founder of the
Latin American Space Association (Asociacion Espacial Latinoamericana
www.alespacio.org). Pablo was elected as Regional Representative (South
America) of the Space Generation Advisory Council in Support of the United Nations
Program on Space Applications. He completed training as member of the Community
Emergency Response Team (CERT), a training program administered by the Federal Emergency
Management Agency (City of Cape Canaveral, Florida). He was recently appointed as
reviewer of the Collection of Preferred Space-Related Standards (CPSRS) being organized
by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
Pablo is one of the original competitors in the X Prize ( link to www.pablodeleon.com) and is working actively in
the X Prize Cup to be held every year in New Mexico ( link to www.xprize.org )
Pablo holds sports scuba-diving certification, professional scuba certification
and is a private pilot.
He is married to Ana Maria, and they currently live in Grand Forks, ND. During their
spare time they enjoy traveling, watching old science fiction movies, designing
rockets ( link to http://www.estesrockets.com/
) and learning more about the next frontier.
