2023 Awards Banquet June 27, 2023 | Museum of Flight
His citation, from Quinn Kupec, PNWAIAA Chair:
I’m pleased to present our 2023 young engineer of the year award to my colleague and friend, Stef Santini.
Stef Santini graduated with me from the University of Maryland in 2020 with a Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering. Stef served as one of the team leads for our capstone project designing a human Mars mission for the NASA RASCAL competition. Stef led the team to be one of only 15 finalists worldwide.
After graduation Stef worked as a flight operation engineer at Omitron supporting various NASA Goddard and human spaceflight missions including Artemis. Stef worked at Omitron for about two years before coming to Blue Origin. Stef started at Blue as a configuration engineer on Orbital Reef. In that role Stef supported major space station layout and configuration trades, including owning the configuration for large sections of the station. Now, Stef works as a configuration engineer supporting the Blue Moon lander, working again to support the Artemis program. Stef is responsible for the layout of the flight deck on the lander and is running key trades to support the lander’s design.
Earlier this year the section found itself without a treasurer. Stef stepped up to take on the role. He quickly came up to speed on the sections finances and got us back on track. Stef has put in extra hours to sort through the sections financial records and make sure everything was taken care of.