Mandy Vaughn
Mandy Vaughn founded GXO, Inc. in 2021 to accelerate the pace of change across the space industry. The goal is supporting new commercial space ventures quickly navigate the start-up environment to start delivering capabilities and missions that matter for commercial and government customers.
She was selected to serve on the National Space Council’s User Advisory Group when it was re-instituted in 2018, where she helps to streamline coordination and cooperation across the U.S.’ space enterprise. She was reappointed to continue serving on the UAG in 2021.
Mandy is formerly President & CEO of VOX Space. Mandy originally joined Virgin Orbit, VOX Space’s parent company, in 2015. As Senior Director of Business Development and Mission Management, she supported business development on the LauncherOne program for both government and commercial customers and served as mission manager for customers including OneWeb and NASA, in addition to spearheading the creation and registration of VOX Space.
Prior to joining Virgin Orbit, Mandy was with General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Space and Intelligence Systems Directorate, where she was responsible for the space control and space protection investment portfolios and analog-to-digital transitions for a variety of SIGINT payload families. She successfully initiated development programs for the next-generation space-based GPS receiver and managed the internal investment of GPS payload development efforts.
Prior to joining General Dynamics, she was a developmental engineer and program manager as an active duty officer in the Air Force and later as a Director with Kinsey Technical Services. She supported programs in the Space Superiority Systems Directorate (SMC/SY) at Los Angeles AFB, CA and earlier the ICBM system program office at Hill AFB, UT. In the Space Superiority mission are, she was the ground segment lead and chief engineer on the Space-Based Space Surveillance program, and then supported a multiple of Space Situational Awareness and command and control programs supporting integration of requirements and demonstrations between the DoD and the intelligence community. She supported the NRO AS&T and DIA Directorate of Science and technology in a variety of collection campaigns that spanned various collection systems phenomena to demonstrate new systems and operational concepts for critical space operations.
Mandy has a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics, both from MIT.