Howard Hu

Howard Hu currently serves as the program manager of the Orion program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He leads the design, development, test, verification, and certification of NASA’s next generation human-rated spacecraft for the Artemis missions.  

Previously, Hu held several key leadership positions within the Orion program, including most recently, Orion deputy program manager. Prior, he was manager for the Orion Avionics, Power, and Software Office, responsible for the design, development, production, test, verification, and certification of the avionics systems, power generation, distribution, and storage system, ground software and support equipment, and flight software. He was deputy manager of the Vehicle Integration Office, managing Orion system requirements, integrated spacecraft design and performance, mission design and analysis, and test and verification. He also led Orion’s Vehicle System Performance and Analysis team, responsible for guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) subsystem design, development test and evaluation (DDT&E), aerodynamics/aerothermal environments development, loads and dynamics analysis, and vehicle modeling and simulations.   

Prior to joining the Orion program in 2007, Hu held a number of key technical and leadership positions at Johnson in support of the Exploration, Space Shuttle and International Space Station (ISS) programs. He served as the chief engineer for exploration in the Aeroscience and Flight Mechanics division and the NASA Exploration Systems GN&C technical discipline lead. He was the project manager and lead developer of the Shuttle Abort Flight Management flight software application for the Space Shuttle Cockpit Avionics Upgrades program. He also served as the deputy system manager for ISS GN&C.