Our Executive Mentors

Mandy Vaughn

Mandy Vaughn is the President of VOX Space. Vaughn originally joined Virgin Orbit, VOX Space’s parent company, in 2015. As Senior Director of Business Development and Mission Management, she supported business development on the LauncherOne program for both government and commercial customers, and served as mission manager for customers including OneWeb and NASA, in addition to spearheading the creation and registration of VOX Space. 

Vaughn also serves as a member of the National Space Council's User Advisory Group, a group of space professionals selected by the Vice President of the United States "to ensure that the interests of industry, other non- Federal entities, and other persons involved in aeronautics and space activities are adequately represented in the deliberations of the National Space Council." 

Prior to joining Virgin Orbit, Vaughn was with General Dynamics Mission Systems’ Space and Intelligence Systems Directorate, where she was responsible for the space control and space protection investment portfolios and analog-to-digital transitions for a variety of SIGINT payload families.  She successfully initiated development programs for the next-generation space-based GPS receiver and managed the internal investment of GPS payload development efforts.

Prior to joining General Dynamics, she was a developmental engineer and program manager in the Air Force and a Director with Kinsey Technical Services.  She primarily supported programs in the Space Superiority Systems Directorate (SMC/SY) at Los Angeles AFB, CA and earlier the ICBM system program office at Hill AFB, UT.  In the Space Superiority mission area, she was the ground segment lead and chief engineer on the Space-Based Space Surveillance program, and then supported a variety of space and ground-based programs for the Directorate.  In that role, she supported a multiple Space Situational Awareness and command and control programs supporting integration of requirements and demonstrations between the DoD and the intelligence community.   She supported the NRO AS&T and DIA Directorate of Science and Technology in a variety of collection campaigns that spanned various collection system phenomena to demonstrate new systems and operational concepts for critical space operations. 

Vaughn has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics, both from MIT.

Vaughn is a happy boat owner (for real – not just on the days that boats are bought and sold) and a world traveler. She is an avid skydiver, and met her husband on-board a perfectly good airplane they were each preparing to jump out of—as they have done many times since.