About

Dr. Jon Morse is President of BoldlyGo Enterprises LLC and co-founder of the NewSpace public benefit corporation AstronetX PBC and nonprofit BoldlyGo Institute. He has more than 25 years of leadership experience in space missions, space-focused organizations, and science and innovation policy. He served as Director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters from 2007-2011, leading a strategic re-organization of the Division and overseeing the successful completion and launch of several space observatories including the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4, the Kepler planet-finding telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, and achieving the first science flights of the SOFIA airborne observatory. Prior to that he served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with a portfolio encompassing physical sciences and engineering at NSF, DOE, NASA and NIST. Before joining the government, he was a Professor of Physics & Astronomy at Arizona State University, and while at the University of Colorado served as Project Scientist for the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, an instrument that was installed aboard Hubble in 2009, and original Principal Investigator of the Near-Infrared Camera & Fabry-Perot Spectrometer for the Apache Point Observatory.

A well-published astrophysicist and prior leader of Explorer and probe-class mission concepts, he has recently been a visiting associate in the Physics, Mathematics & Astronomy division at the California Institute of Technology and in the Solar, Stellar & Planetary Sciences division at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. His previous academic leadership, workforce management and technology R&D portfolio experience includes roles as Associate Director of the Center for Astrophysics & Space Astronomy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and following his tenure at NASA as Professor of Physics and Associate Vice President for Research for Physical Sciences & Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a Harvard graduate and earned his PhD from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.