Power & Propulsion Element (PPE)

Vince Bilardo served as the Sr. Executive Program Director responsible for the $600 million PPE prime contract at Maxar Space, LLC. In this role, Vince provided senior leadership of a team of 200+ staff executing PPE spacecraft design, development, qualification, and test of PPE units, subsystems, and integrated spacecraft system, from contract inception through completion of the Preliminary Design phase.

Project Background

The Power & Propulsion Element (PPE) serves as the cornerstone for the Gateway lunar orbiting platform.  Gateway is a key element of NASA’s Artemis program which will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon’s surface later this decade.  Gateway will provide a rendezvous point for crew being carried to lunar orbit in the Orion crewed spacecraft to dock and transfer into human-rated lunar landing vehicles for the sortie to the lunar surface.

Vince expertly guided the Maxar team through the challenge of restructuring the PPE mission to align with the Co-Manifest Vehicle (CMV) approach in which PPE will be integrated with the Habitation & Logistics Outpost (HALO) element at Kennedy Space Center, and launched on a single heavy lift commercial launch.  In support of this restructuring, Vince led his team in planning, organizing, and implementing an effort to add several new engineering change proposals and study task orders to the PPE contract, to realign the PPE program to the CMV architecture.

Vince directed the Maxar team in successfully executing five key program milestone reviews over 3 years, resulting in NASA’s exercise of the contract option to proceed with final design, build, and delivery of PPE spacecraft.