DENVER, Colorado - May 4, 2022
Gary Calnan, CEO of CisLunar Industries, is pleased to announce the appointment of Lee Steinke as Chief Operating Officer, effective April 2022. She will support the CEO in setting and executing the company’s strategy alongside Chief Technology Officer Joe Pawelski and Managing Director for Europe Walter Schroeder.
“We are thrilled to have Lee joining the leadership team at CisLunar.” Calnan said. “She has the knowledge and experience to ensure we execute on our vision and make it a reality in this critical time of accelerating growth for CisLunar and the in-space economy. And she is such a perfect fit for the culture of this tight-knit team that it feels like she’s been with us from the beginning.”
“When Gary told us he wanted to hire Lee,” Pawelski said, “he had us interview her, and it was the easiest decision ever.”
Lee has been an executive consultant and advisor in the aerospace and defense industry for the past year, working on business and technical projects for military, non-profit, and commercial clients, including CisLunar Industries. Her 20-year career as a scientist and executive has covered several industries.
Prior to being in the aerospace industry, Lee was engaged in the energy industry working with both publicly traded and private-equity-backed companies. In these roles, Lee was a key decision-maker for capital budgets reaching $760 million per year. She led and managed multidisciplinary teams that added over $1 billion in value through operational and technical improvements determined from science, engineering, and data analytics; turnaround of failing industrial processes; identification of new opportunities; and startup of newly acquired business units.
Lee is well published as a key contributor to many technical publications and is a sought-after speaker, panelist, moderator, and host. A licensed Professional Geologist, she was Chair of the Advisory Board for the Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists and is now learning new things about space resources.
Lee holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an MS in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University, and a BA with Distinction in Geology and Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“It’s an exciting time to join CisLunar Industries,” Lee said. “We are embarking on our NASA Phase 2 SBIR, and we are building technologies and partnerships that will advance the industry’s capabilities in both in-situ resource utilization and in-space manufacturing.”
About CisLunar Industries
CisLunar Industries is a space technology company that is turning space debris and other in situ materials into a resource for accelerating the in-space industrial revolution. CisLunar’s Micro Space Foundry (MSF) is a distributed metal processing capability composed of numerous, small, low-cost, modular processing units that receive metal feedstock and process it into basic metal products for In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM), as well as into propellant for in-space transportation and logistics. MSFs are platform agnostic and can be deployed to the locations and in the quantities needed to match feedstock supply and product demand. CisLunar demonstrated an initial Earth-based prototype in 2021 and sees a path to a commercially available system in the 2023-2025 timeframe.
Learn more at www.cislunarindustries.com.