A veteran of a litany of NASA’s central human spaceflight programs of the past two decades, Dr. Michael Baine is Axiom Space’s Chief Engineer/Chief Designer. He oversees the design of and design philosophy behind the Axiom Station, which will serve as humanity’s next-generation home in space for research, manufacturing, testing, and commerce. 

Prior to joining Axiom, Michael held the position of Chief of Engineering at Intuitive Machines, whose development of autonomous intelligent systems and lifting body reentry vehicles was an outgrowth of NASA’s Project Morpheus – on which he also previously served as Chief Engineer. His NASA career also included roles as propulsion system manager and lead test and verification engineer on the Orion program, propulsion development for the International Space Station and Space Shuttle, and work on the Columbia accident investigation team. 

Michael holds degrees in electrical and computer engineering (B.S. ’93) and physics (B.S. ’93, M.S. ’98, C. Phil. ’98, Ph.D. ’00) from the University of California at San Diego, where his doctoral work was supervised by Dr. Sally K. Ride. Upon graduation, he was awarded a National Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship to study electric propulsion with Dr. Franklin Chang Diaz.