BIOGRAPHY

David W. Thompson

Mr. David W. Thompson is the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Orbital Sciences Corporation, as well as one of the company's three co-founders. Since its start-up in 1982, Orbital has grown to be one of the world's leading space technology enterprises. The company will generate nearly $1.4 billion in 2011 revenue and currently employs approximately 3,700 people.

Under Mr. Thompson's leadership, Orbital has become the industry's leading developer and manufacturer of smaller, more affordable space and launch systems. For nearly 30 years, the company has pioneered new classes of rockets, satellites and other space-based systems, and new methods for designing and building them, that have helped to make space applications more affordable, accessible and useful to customers around the world.

Before co-founding Orbital, Mr. Thompson was special assistant to the president of Hughes Aircraft Company's Missile Systems Group and was a project manager and engineer on advanced rocket engines at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. As a college student, he worked on the first Mars landing missions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on Space Shuttle projects at NASA's Langley Research Center and Johnson Space Center.

As a result of his work at Orbital, Mr. Thompson was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bush in 1991. He has also received numerous other technical and business awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award, the California Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Award, the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum Trophy, the George Low Space Transportation and Lawrence Sperry Awards from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the World Technology Award for Space from The Economist magazine. Mr. Thompson has also been recognized as Virginia's Industrialist of the Year, High-Technology Entrepreneur of the Year by Inc. magazine, and Satellite Executive of the Year by Via Satellite magazine.

Mr. Thompson is a Fellow and served as President of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2009-2010. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society, the Royal Aeronautical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics.

He received a bachelor's degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received the National Space Club's Goddard Scholarship; a master's degree in aeronautics from California Institute of Technology, where he held a Hertz Foundation Fellowship; and a MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Rockwell International Fellow.