Virgin Orbit Hires former OneWeb Satellites CEO as COO
Long Beach, Calif., February 17, 2021 - Virgin Orbit announced today that Tony Gingiss has joined the team as their Chief Operating Officer (COO). As the first person to hold this position, Tony will oversee day-to-day operations at Virgin Orbit’s state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Long Beach, California. His arrival follows the successful LauncherOne mission in January and completes a sequence of enhancements to the company’s executive team as Virgin Orbit pivots to commercial operations.
Gingiss brings more than 30 years of aerospace experience in design, production, operations and leadership to this new role. Most recently, he served as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OneWeb Satellites, where he led that company through design, low-rate-initial production, pilot launches, and into full production. Under his leadership, the company built a new factory and scaled to a production rate of two satellites per day — the successful realization of a fundamentally new approach to aerospace manufacturing.
Prior to his role at OneWeb Satellites, Gingiss spent more than two decades with the Boeing (formerly Hughes) Satellites Systems group in roles spanning space, ground, engineering, operations, and leadership, including, most prominently, his role as the Director of Strategic Integration and National Space Communications Programs. Gingiss received his Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University and was awarded Purdue’s 2019 Outstanding Aerospace Engineer award. He was also awarded a Charles Stark Draper Laboratories Fellowship and received his Master of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.
“I’m very excited to welcome Tony to our Virgin Orbit family. His leadership, insight, and experience will be a huge asset to us as we take the next step in our journey from a team focused on R&D to a launch company focused on serving our customers,” said Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart. “Now that we’ve proven out our LauncherOne system, it’s time to scale up operations and prepare for company expansion.”
Virgin Orbit is already integrating its next several rockets at the company’s main production facility in Long Beach, CA. The precise delivery of ten NASA-sponsored spacecraft during its January launch demonstration has enabled the company to turn its full attention to operational excellence and to rate production to serve its growing manifest of customers.
Virgin Orbit builds and operates LauncherOne, a dedicated launch service for commercial and government-built small satellites. Designed and manufactured in Long Beach, California, LauncherOne rockets are air-launched from our modified 747-400 carrier aircraft – allowing it to operate from locations all over the world in order to best serve each customer’s needs.
