Keith Gildea

Keith Gildea’s career journey is somewhat unique as he used to work in film and theater in New York City as a technician/designer. After getting fired from a job for which he was not getting paid for he thought to himself, “maybe I’m in the wrong industry.” After doing some soul searching, his affinity for math and love of putting things together led him to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering. With one failed career under his belt, he decided to set his sights high and aim to work in the space industry.

After graduating from NYU in 2016 as ME with a minor in aerospace, Keith began work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Mars 2020 mission. He started there working on odds and ends for other overloaded engineers, but soon moved to work mechanical integration and test for the Telecom team, helping deliver a fully qualified telecom system to the Descent Stage and Rover. Next, he became the cognizant engineer for a small mechanism in the Rover that helped manipulate sample tubes; this hardware is currently lying in the dust on the surface of Mars. After delivering that hardware in 2020, Keith moved to a small space company in Pittsburgh called Astrobotic. He has spent the last three years leading the effort to deliver the structure for the Griffin spacecraft, which is slated to bring NASA’s VIPER rover to the Lunar South Pole.