The ITA Team

ITA is comprised of a staff of fifteen full-time employees. This includes management, engineering, and scientific personnel who support the company's ongoing contracts. The ITA team is a balanced mixture of experienced professionals and young motivated engineers. Senior engineers and space consultants have been involved in the aerospace industry, some as far back as the 1950's. Their expertise includes expendable launch vehicles, space probes, satellites, Space Shuttle integration, systems engineering and project management. ITA's crafts-people are skilled in the fabrication, assembly and testing of aerospace hardware, payload integration, and flight measurements.

Commercialization of space activities represent a new emerging industry. Key ITA personnel have testified several times to U.S. Congressional committees to privide private sector inputs to steer commercialization of space plans in the U.S.

In addition, ITA utilizes a vast array of consultants who provide specialized technical expertise on a project basis. This group of consultants includes business executives, engineers, and scientists from the aerospace, space and biomedical industries. The ITA Board of Technical Advisors includes several world-renowned scientists who provide technical and advisory support to the company.

Mr. Cassanto was educated from the Pennsylvania State University in 1961 with a B.S. in aeronautical engineering, and has served four years in the U. S. Air Force. He spent 25 years with General Electric, and was heavily involved with missile and re-entry vehicle flight test programs. Mr. Cassanto has held responsible positions on projects ranging from powered flight launch vehicle analysis to re-entry vehicles, instrumentation development, missile systems, planetary probes, recovery capsules/retardation systems, and satellite integration on the Space Shuttle. Specifically, he led and was responsible for the design, development, ground and flight testing of the Minuteman missle nosetip system and meeting milestones on time within budget.

Since forming ITA in 1983, he has been a vocal supporter of NASA's low-cost quick turn-around Space Shuttle programs to promote microgravity experimentation and he has testified to congressional hearings on the commercialization of space in both 1985 and 1993. He is committed to space commercialization and has developed low-cost standardized flight hardware for Space Shuttle flight experiments and materials processing. He has successfully negotiated a Joint Endeavor Agreement (JEA) with NASA for Hitchhiker carrier flights. ITA space hardware is also baselined for International Space Station missions.

Mr. Cassanto is a member of both the AIAA and the ISA and has presented and published more than 50 papers.

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