Simone Damico

Background

About Simone Damico

Simone D’Amico is Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AA) and Professor of Geophysics (by Courtesy). He is the Founding Director of the Stanford Space Rendezvous Laboratory, Director of the Undergraduate Program in AA, and Founding Co-Director of the Center for AEroSpace Autonomy Research (CAESAR) at Stanford. He is W.M. Keck Faculty Scholar in the School of Engineering and Hoover Science Fellow. He has 20+ years of experience in research and development of autonomous spacecraft and distributed space systems, including multi-agent architectures such as “rendezvous, proximity operations, and capture”, “satellite formation-flying and swarms”, “fractionated spacecraft”, and “mega-constellations”. He developed the distributed Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) system of several such missions (e.g, TanDEM-X, PRISMA) and is currently the institutional PI of four autonomous satellite swarms funded by NASA and NSF with one of them (NASA Starling) operational in orbit. Besides academia, Dr. D’Amico is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) of EraDrive Inc. He is in the Advisory Board of four space start-ups focusing on distributed space systems for future applications in SAR remote sensing, orbital lifetime prolongation, and space-based solar power. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Politecnico di Milano (2003) and the Ph.D. degree from Delft University of Technology (2010). Before Stanford, Dr. D’Amico was research scientist and team leader at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). He was the recipient of several awards, including the 2020 M. Barry Carlton Award, Best Paper Awards at AMOS (2025), IAF (2022), (2021), AIAA (2021), AAS (2019) conferences, the Leonardo 500 Award by the Leonardo da Vinci Society/ISSNAF (2019), FAI/NAA’s Group Diploma of Honor (2018), DLR’s Sabbatical/Forschungssemester (2012) and Wissenschaft Preis (2006), and NASA’s Group Achievement Awards for the STARLING (2024) and GRACE mission (2004).