Dr. Bill Ailor

Dr. Bill Ailor is the director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation, located in El Segundo, California. He has worked in the reentry breakup area for over 30 years, and received a NASA Group Achievement Award in 1992 for his work helping to understand the reentry breakup characteristics of the Space Shuttle External Tank. He was chair of the Reentry Subpanel of the Interagency Nuclear Safety Review Panel (INSRP) for the Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini, and Mars Explorer missions (INSRP provides independent assessments to the White House on the safety of space missions containing radioactive materials) and was Reentry Subject Matter Expert for the Mars Exploration Rover and Pluto New Horizons missions.

Dr. Ailor testified to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board on what might be learned from recovered debris. He was general chairman of the 2004 and 2007 Planetary Defense Conferences: Protecting Earth from Asteroids, was co-chair of the 1st International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Planetary Defense Conference held 2009, and co-chairs the 2011 IAA Planetary Defense Conference to be held in Bucharest, Romania. He heads the U.S. delegation on ISO's Orbital Debris Coordinating Working Group, which leads the development of international standards to minimize the production of orbital debris, and he contributed to the development of the IAA Position Paper on Space Debris Mitigation and IAA Cosmic Study on Traffic Management Rules for Space Operations.  Dr. Ailor chairs the Reentry and Space Debris Technical Committee for the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS).  Dr. Ailor has published several articles and professional papers on space traffic control, reentry breakup, planetary defense, and space debris.