leadership
David Kervin is the CEO of Proteus Space Inc. David served with distinction in duty assignments around the world in the Intelligence Community and as a US Marine, he is honorably retired with 20 years of service. David’s career highlights include VP of Federal at Stanford Research Institute (SRI International), where he was responsible for $400 million in “DARPA hard” solutions across quantum, AI, robotics, cyber, space and other advanced technologies, and as SVP & GM for Global Solutions with Kymeta, a Bill Gates Series C/D portfolio company providing satellite connectivity solutions. David has summited Kilimanjaro for charity and completed a solo 100-kilometer race in one day as a sponsored athlete for the Semper Fi Foundation. He is also an acknowledged contributor to the critically acclaimed tech futures novel, “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War”. David holds a BS with Honors from Norwich University and a Graduate Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from Stanford University.
Dr. Terry Gdoutos is the Vice President for Rapid Spacecraft Engineering at Proteus Space, Inc. Terry’s engineering career highlights include the prototyping, development, and on-orbit demonstration of innovative spaceflight payloads as a Principal Staff Scientist in Aerospace at Caltech and failure analysis investigations for complex engineering disasters as a Senior Engineer at Exponent, Inc. Specifically, Terry invented and led the development and space qualification of prototype deployable systems for space power beaming applications, led from concept to launch the low earth orbit technology demonstration mission DOLCE, and developed innovative manufacturing methods for ultra-light and shape accurate composite structures in space. His failure analysis experience includes conducting field investigations combined with in-lab experimentation and modeling and simulation to identify the root cause of accidents in rail, mining, and industrial thermomechanical systems and to develop engineering solutions preventing similar failures in the future. Terry holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a BS in Computer Science, from Northwestern University, and an MS and Ph.D. from Caltech in Aerospace. He has over 30 technical publications and six US patents granted.
Dr. Richard Otis is the Principal Computational Engineer at Proteus Space, Inc., where he leads the software development team for MERCURY™, the company’s flagship automated satellite design and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) platform. He worked for eight years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a computational materials scientist and advanced manufacturing technologist. Otis is the creator and co-lead of the open-source CALPHAD-based computational thermodynamics software library PyCalphad, a software for which his team received the NASA JPL Software of the Year Award in 2019, and for which he was individually awarded the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal in 2023. He also taught thermodynamics and phase transformations of materials as adjunct faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, for five years. Otis holds a BS in Polymer and Fiber Engineering from Georgia Tech and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Pennsylvania State University. He has experience working across scientific disciplines, with over 40 peer-reviewed publications in advanced manufacturing, physical chemistry, numerical methods, and Bayesian uncertainty quantification.
Lacey Littleton is the Technical Project Manager for the ESPA class MERCURY ONE mission—Proteus Space’s first automatically designed custom bus satellite using MERCURY™, our automated computational engineering design system. She holds both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her career spans multiple NASA missions, with expertise in spacecraft systems engineering, assembly, integration, and testing. At Georgia Tech’s Space Systems Design Laboratory, she led integration and testing of the propulsion system for Lunar Flashlight, a NASA CubeSat mission aimed at detecting lunar ice. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), she led verification and validation of telecommunications system-level requirements for the Europa Clipper System Testbed team, and supported major test campaigns including Fault Protection, Deep Space Network Compatibility, EMI/EMC, and Thermal Vacuum Testing. She also contributed to the Mars 2020 mission, conducting flight software testing for the Rover Motor Control Assembly. Her work has directly supported spacecraft launch readiness, mission assurance, and operational testing for deep space exploration.
Dillan McDonald is the Mission Operations Lead at Proteus Space, where he directs the planning, execution, and automation of mission operations for the company and our customers. With a background in deep space operations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dillan brings hands-on experience from missions including Lunar Trailblazer, Psyche, Lunar Flashlight, and ARMADILLO. On Psyche, he led investigation efforts into spacecraft power system noise, oversaw on-orbit characterization of the solar arrays and batteries, developed the initial bakeout of the electric propulsion system, and developed mission-critical software for data management. For Lunar Trailblazer, he served as a Flight Director, leading launch and early operations, building real-time telemetry and DSN monitoring tools, and developing recovery and anomaly response protocols. Dillan holds a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and a Bachelor’s degree from The University of Texas at Austin. His work reflects a strong focus on spacecraft autonomy, operational resilience, and data-driven mission assurance.
