Mike Ciannilli

Mike Ciannilli is a professional speaker, on-air media commentator and consultant to governmental and commercial organizations. After completing a 30-year career in a wide variety of key leadership positions in America’s space program, Ciannilli shares NASA’s most invaluable and powerful lessons learned with companies and organizations across the United States and around the world. He delivers keynote speeches, presentations and engagements on a wide variety of insightful, translatable topics, and he turns complex technical subjects into clear, compelling stories for film, television, live news, podcast, print and radio audiences. In his consulting work, Ciannilli has contributed expertise to a broad range of projects and programs, delivering impactful results for diverse clients.

Ciannilli created NASA’s Apollo Challenger Columbia Lessons Learned Program, known as ACCLLP, designing and leading innovative events, media productions and collaborations to enshrine the lessons of failure and help ensure NASA’s future success across programs and missions. Through powerful storytelling and extensive multimedia collaborations, he connected the technical with the emotional, producing a profoundly effective impact on audiences. After creating the program in 2016, Ciannilli served for a decade as its program manager, delivering a significant positive influence on decision making across all levels of NASA and contractor leadership and enhancing development of a healthy workforce culture focused on safety and mission success.

Before and during his tenure as ACCLLP program manager, Ciannilli led two historically significant efforts: the Columbia Research and Preservation Office and the space shuttle Challenger recovery office. His leadership ensured the respectful recovery, handling, preservation and study of pivotal artifacts from spaceflight history. Those responsibilities included preservation and protection of fallen space shuttle artifacts, management of the Columbia and Challenger artifact recovery efforts, and execution of an artifact loan program that made Columbia artifacts available for research and academic purposes, the only program of its kind in the world.

Ciannilli also led the creation and development of the internationally recognized Forever Remembered exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Visited by millions of people each year, Forever Remembered serves as the nation’s memorial to the fallen crews of the space shuttle Columbia and the space shuttle Challenger tragedies.

Ciannilli served nine years as NASA test director for the space shuttle program at Kennedy Space Center, responsible for processing oversight of the space shuttle orbiters and ground support systems, including launch and landing facilities. That role included leading the entire launch team through space shuttle launch countdown activities. He also served as landing recovery director, leading contingency operations during launch countdown and landing activities, including flight crew recovery.

During the Columbia accident recovery in 2003, Ciannilli flew extensively onboard helicopters across Texas, leading air search operations to find and recover Columbia and her crew.

Before joining NASA in 2005, Ciannilli was a contractor for United Space Alliance, where he spent eight years as a test project engineer leading testing and engineering integration during processing, launch and postflight operations of the space shuttle launch vehicle and ground systems elements. During that time, he was assigned to the engineering leadership team of the space shuttle Columbia and held responsibilities to brief the flight crew prior to launch. He led the launch countdown simulation team, developing and directing high-fidelity simulations to train the entire launch team, and as the simulation lead for the Mission Management Team, he trained the leadership of the space shuttle program. Earlier roles included fuel cell system engineer responsible for testing and checkout of electrical power, water generation and payload support systems onboard the orbiter and an internship in space center operations and engineering for Pan Am World Services at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base. Prior to his space program career, Ciannilli worked in education as a high school teacher and private tutor.

Ciannilli has received numerous awards, including a Silver Snoopy, NASA Exceptional Service Medal, NASA Quest Outreach Award, Launch and Landing Leadership Award, Launch Countdown Simulation Contingency Leadership Award and a Columbia Recovery Team Award, among others.

Ciannilli holds a Bachelor of Science in space science from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. He grew up in Syracuse, New York, and, in addition to his lifelong passion for the space program, enjoys spending time with his family, surfing, boating, hiking, skiing and film and television production.