Prina Mauro

Silicon Valley manager. In 1996, after graduating in Mechanical Engineering, one of his professors suggested that he go to Pasadena, to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study the cooling system of the Planck satellite, the design of which he supervised. Nasa then hired him, and his area of expertise expanded to the point where he signed, as project manager, the technical documentation of the entire cooling system installed on the rocket. Once this project was finished, he also worked on the space rover to Mars.
In 2007, he decided to make a change, because at NASA he felt that the pace of design and work was too slow. Within a day, he was interviewed and hired at SpaceX, the company that Elon Musk founded to build space vehicles for the orbital transport of people and things, where he has now been Director of Thermal Dynamics since 2012.