Last month, THEIA’s first group of graduating seniors received their diplomas and began their post-graduation journeys. Both of them have made several critical contributions to THEIA’s progress, and the mission owes many breakthroughs to their dedication.

THEIA Class of 2024:

Vince Olindo – Chief Engineer – Aerospace Engineering

Vince was THEIA’s first Chief Engineer. He was one of its very first members during pre-proposal conceptual studies in 2021. He led initial recruiting for the project, co-wrote the proposal to UNP NS-11, and oversaw the development of mission documentation. After THEIA’s acceptance, he was a driving force behind refining mission objectives and scope while guiding the direction of subsystem development. He has worked to great effect as a jack-of-all-trades in the technical realm, picking up countless challenging design tasks and analyses across all of THEIA’s subsystems. Vince is directly responsible for a great deal of THEIA’s overall success.

He has accepted a position as a Spacecraft Systems Engineer for Rocket Lab in California and will be passing the CE reins to former Project Manager and Avionics Lead, Noah Wigglesworth.

Justin Rhoads – Payload – Aerospace Engineering

Justin has served as an anchor for the Payload subteam since Spring 2022, through many design overhauls and fuzzy task outlooks. He is immensely capable and has been instrumental in understanding, developing, and implementing THEIA’s complicated payload processing algorithms. His broad technical expertise and ability to understand complex issues from the top down has been a crucial focusing lens for the payload concept.

He has accepted a position as a Starlink Enterprise Integration & Test Engineer for SpaceX.

We will dearly miss these two, but we are immensely proud of them and their accomplishments and wish them all the best going forward. We know they are on track to do great things in the future.