Lauren Lyons holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and certificates in Robotics & Intelligent Systems and Engineering Biology from Princeton University, as well as a Master’s in Business and Government Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Prior to joining Firefly, Lauren served as a Lead Systems Engineer in Blue Origin’s Advanced Concepts department where she led a team developing a novel spacecraft, and before that, led the Human Landing System National Team’s Requirements, Verification, Validation, and Certification team.
Prior to Blue, Lauren spent several years at SpaceX where she worked in Reliability, Safety and Mission Assurance, and Chief Engineering for Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon, and Falcon 9; there, her responsibilities included risk and change management, leading anomaly investigations, serving as the on-console mission safety official, and leading the NASA Certification Engineering effort for Crew Dragon’s first visit to the Space Station. She held additional roles as a Technical Product Lead on the Starlink program working on initial product development and go-to-market strategy, as well as roles in Mission Management where she supported more than seven Falcon 9 commercial and government spacecraft integration and launch campaigns.
Before embarking upon her commercial space career, Lauren worked as a medical device R&D engineer at Medtronic where she holds multiple patents, taught leadership courses at Harvard University, and was a published science writer.
A passionate advocate for engineering education, Lauren serves as an Executive Mentor for the Patti Grace Smith Foundation, and co-hosted of many seminal SpaceX milestone launch webcasts, including the Emmy Award winning Demo-2 mission.