Mr. Cassanto is Chief Executive Officer of Instrumentation Technology Associates, Inc (ITA).
Mr. Cassanto spent 25 years with the General Electric Company (GE) Missile and Space Division where he was heavily involved with missile and re-entry vehicle flight test programs. Mr. Cassanto held responsible positions within GE such as Project Engineer, Systems Engineer, and Chief Engineer, and has worked on the Minuteman Re-entry Vehicle, planetary probes, the Biosatellite and Discoverer orbital recovery capsules, TPS instrumentation development, and Space Shuttle Satellite integration.
In 1983, Mr. Cassanto formed ITA which was one of the earliest US companies to embrace government initiatives to promote commercial microgravity experiments and research targeted to produce products and technology from space. He developed commercial low-cost standardized flight hardware carriers and multi-purpose generic microgravity automated laboratories for materials processing in space with private sector resources. His business model provides turnkey services to users by leasing portions of flight hardware along with payload integration and engineering services to customers wishing to conduct experiments in the microgravity environment of space. He has testified several times at Congressional hearings of the House Science Committee regarding commercial space activities, and has negotiated three Space Act Agreements with NASA for commercial access to space.
ITA’s hardware has been flown on 21 space missions consisting of sounding rocket flights, Space Shuttle missions, the Russian Mir Space Station and the International Space Station; all of the missions but two were utilized to conduct private sector funded urokinase cancer research in space. In addition, Mr. Cassanto initiated a program to fly student experiments piggyback on all of ITA’s commercial payloads. His hardware flew on the ill-fated STS-107 mission and actually survived the break-up and crash of Columbia.
John M. Cassanto graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering, and served four years in the U. S. Air Force.