Michael F. Lembeck (B.S. ’80, M.S. ’81, Ph.D., ’91 UIUC) is the President of CEPStone, LLC in Champaign, IL.  Dr. Lembeck has provided subject matter expertise to KBRwyle, SAIC, and Boeing (CST-100 Commercial Crew Vehicle program). Prior to that, he was the Corporate Lead Executive for Northrop Grumman’s Houston Operations. He also serves as a Clinical Associate Professor at the Laboratory for Advanced Space Systems at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.


As the Requirements Division Director for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Dr. Lembeck participated in the formulation of President Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration and managed the original development of requirements for the Constellation/Orion program. Prior to joining NASA, he was Vice President for Remote Sensing Programs at the Orbital Sciences Corporation, overseeing the design, development, and production of two state-of-the-art spacecraft (OrbView-3 and OrbView-4/Warfighter-1), their cameras, and the complementary ground segment.

Dr. Lembeck was also the Chief Engineer for a primary free-flying space shuttle payload, Wake Shield Facility-3, at Houston’s Space Industries, Inc., where he also served as the Manager of Engineering. Dr. Lembeck designed, coded, and integrated the first fuzzy logic application to fly in space inside a refrigerator/incubator module used for protein crystal growth studies on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. Prior to completing his Ph.D., he worked at TRW in the Systems Effectiveness Section and at the Jet Propulsion Lab in the Galileo spacecraft Attitude and Articulation Control System Test Group, both in southern California.

Dr. Lembeck is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA and is the co-Chair of the AIAA UAP Integration and Outreach Committee.