Mike Ciannilli

Mike Ciannilli is a professional speaker, on-air media commentary and consultant to both governmental and commercial organizations. After completing a 30-year career in a wide variety of key leadership positions in America’s space program, Mike now passionately shares NASA’s most invaluable and powerful lessons learned to companies and organizations across the United States and countries throughout the world. As a professional speaker, Ciannilli has delivered numerous impactful keynote speeches, presentations, and engagements on a wide variety of insightful, invaluable, and translatable topics. On the media front, he has engaged extensively with all genres of media including film, television, live news, podcast, print, and radio to turn complex topics into clear, compelling stories that audiences can easily grasp, connect with, and embrace. In his consulting endeavors, Mike has shared his expertise across a wide variety of projects and programs delivering impactful results for a diverse array of clients.

The decade prior to starting his latest bold endeavor, Mike created NASA’s Apollo Challenger Columbia Lessons Learned Program (ACCLLP), designing and leading innovative events, media productions, and a wide variety of collaborations and activities to powerfully enshrine the lessons of failure to help ensure NASA’s future success across all programs and missions. Through powerful storytelling and extensive multimedia collaborations, he successfully connected the technical with the emotional, resulting in a profoundly effective impact on the audiences. After Ciannilli created this remarkably innovative program in 2016 he continued to serve for a decade as its program manager and was responsible for having delivered a significantly positive influence on decision making across all levels of NASA and contractor leadership and in enhancing the development of a healthy workforce culture focused on safety and mission success.

Before and throughout his tenure as program manager, Mike also led two historically significant efforts: the Columbia Research and Preservation Office and the Space Shuttle Challenger Recovery Office. His leadership in these roles ensured the respectful recovery, handling, preservation, and learning from these pivotal moments in spaceflight history. These responsibilities included the preservation and protection of all fallen space shuttle artifacts, management of the Columbia and Challenger artifact recovery efforts and execution of the artifact loan program, which loaned out Columbia artifacts for research and academic purposes making it the only one of its kind in the world.

He also led the creation and development of the internationally recognized Forever Remembered exhibit located at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Visited by millions of people each year, Forever Remembered serves as the nation’s memorial to the fallen crews of the Space Shuttle Columbia and Space Shuttle Challenger tragedies.

Previously, Ciannilli served nine years as NASA Test Director for the Space Shuttle Program at the Kennedy Space Center responsible for processing oversight of the space shuttle orbiters and ground support systems including launch and landing facilities. In addition, this responsibility included leading the entire launch team through space shuttle launch countdown activities. He also was the Landing Recovery Director responsible for leading contingency operations during launch countdown and landing activities, including flight crew recovery.

In 2003, during the Columbia accident recovery, Ciannilli flew extensively onboard helicopters across Texas leading air search operations in finding and bringing Columbia and her crew home.

Before joining NASA in 2005, Ciannilli was a contractor for United Space Alliance where he spent eight years as a Test Project Engineer, leading the testing and engineering integration during all processing, launch and post flight operations of the space shuttle launch vehicle and ground systems elements. During this time, he was assigned to the engineering leadership team of the Space Shuttle Columbia which included responsibilities to brief the flight crew prior to launch. Prior to this he was the lead of the Launch Countdown Simulation team, where he developed and lead high fidelity simulations to train the entire launch team. Additionally, as the simulation lead for the Mission Management Team, he also trained the leadership of the entire Space

Shuttle Program. Before this role, Ciannilli worked as a fuel cell system engineer responsible for the testing and checkout of the electrical power, water generation and payload support systems onboard the space shuttle orbiter. He also worked as an intern in space center operations and engineering for Pan Am World Services at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Prior to starting his space program career, he worked in the academic world both as a high school teacher and as a private tutor.

He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including a Silver Snoopy,NASA Exceptional Service Medal, NASA Quest Outreach Award, Launch and Landing Leadership Award, Launch Countdown Simulation Contingency Leadership Award, and a Columbia Recovery Team Award, among many others.

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