Aude Vignelles is the Chief Technology Officer of the Australian Space Agency. As part of the senior executive team, Aude leads and is responsible for writing the civil space strategy technical roadmaps, scoping and managing the Agency’s space programs and delivering on domestic and international activities. She provides an in-depth understanding of the national and international space industry, program management expertise and a breadth of space science and systems engineering skills. Prior to this role, Aude was the Executive Manager, Satellite & Fixed Wireless Operations at nbn.
Aude is a space and aeronautics engineer (graduating from ENSICA, Toulouse) who started her career at the European Space Agency (ESA) in the Netherlands. She became a source of expertise for the test campaign of all scientific programmes run by ESA from their early phase, such as Rosetta. She was appointed Test Manager for the X-ray Multi Mirror mission (XMM), then the largest scientific space program ever carried out by ESA. She then moved to London where she started a career in the broadcast industry and successfully integrated the first digital terrestrial broadcast centre in the world (ONdigital). She continued this career in broadcast and media here in Australia with Foxtel and Austar. She later was appointed Vice President of Technicolor covering all programs in the APAC region.
Aude has been living in Australia for the past 20 years and has contributed to the Australian space community through White Papers, events at conferences with the growing start-up community in Australia, and promotion for Women in Space and Engineering at universities.