Mike Ciannilli

Book Mike Ciannilli for your event

Mike Ciannilli is a professional speaker, on-air media commentator and consultant who brings 30 years of experience from America's space program to audiences, companies and organizations. Across his career, he held a wide variety of key leadership positions connected to NASA and the Space Shuttle Program, giving him an exceptional perspective on leadership, decision-making, safety, organizational culture, failure and mission success.

Today, Mike passionately shares NASA's most valuable lessons learned with organizations across the United States and around the world. His keynote speeches, presentations and engagements transform highly complex experiences into clear and relevant insights. His approach combines technical knowledge with the human side of leadership, allowing audiences to understand how decisions, behaviors, communication and culture can have consequences far beyond the moment.

Mike is also highly experienced in media, having worked across film, television, live news, podcasts, print and radio. He has a particular ability to turn complicated subjects into clear and compelling stories that audiences can grasp, connect with and embrace. As a consultant, he applies the same expertise across diverse projects and programs for governmental and commercial clients.

Lessons from Apollo, Challenger and Columbia

In 2016, Mike Ciannilli created NASA's Apollo Challenger Columbia Lessons Learned Program, known as ACCLLP. He designed the program and served as its program manager for a decade, developing innovative events, media productions, collaborations and activities built around one central purpose: ensuring that the lessons of past failures remained alive and relevant to NASA's future.

Through powerful storytelling and extensive multimedia collaborations, Mike connected technical lessons with their emotional and human significance. The program positively influenced decision-making across levels of NASA and contractor leadership while supporting the development of a healthy workforce culture focused on safety and mission success.

His work demonstrates how organizations can examine failure without allowing its lessons to become abstract history. For audiences beyond the space industry, these experiences offer valuable perspectives on learning from mistakes, maintaining organizational memory, recognizing risk and creating cultures where people remain focused on what matters when the stakes are high.

Preserving the lessons of spaceflight

Before and during his tenure leading ACCLLP, Mike headed two historically significant efforts: the Columbia Research and Preservation Office and the Space Shuttle Challenger Recovery Office. His leadership helped ensure the respectful recovery, handling and preservation of artifacts connected to two pivotal tragedies in spaceflight history, while making certain that these artifacts could continue to serve a meaningful educational and research purpose.

His responsibilities included protecting fallen space shuttle artifacts, managing Columbia and Challenger artifact recovery efforts and executing the Columbia artifact loan program. Through this unique program, Columbia artifacts were made available for research and academic purposes, creating opportunities to transform physical evidence from tragedy into knowledge that could benefit future missions.

Mike also led the creation and development of the internationally recognized Forever Remembered exhibit at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Visited by millions of people each year, the exhibit serves as the nation's memorial to the fallen crews of Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia.

These experiences give Mike a deeply human perspective on remembrance, responsibility and the importance of carrying difficult lessons forward.

Leadership when the stakes are high

Before these roles, Mike served for nine years as a NASA Test Director for the Space Shuttle Program at Kennedy Space Center. He was responsible for processing oversight of the space shuttle orbiters and ground support systems, including launch and landing facilities. His responsibilities also included leading the entire launch team through space shuttle launch countdown activities.

As Landing Recovery Director, Mike led contingency operations during launch countdown and landing activities, including flight crew recovery. His experience was tested in an especially profound way following the Columbia accident in 2003. During the recovery operation, Mike flew extensively aboard helicopters across Texas, leading air search operations to locate Columbia and help bring the shuttle and her crew home.

Before joining NASA in 2005, Mike spent eight years with United Space Alliance as a Test Project Engineer. There, he led testing and engineering integration during processing, launch and post-flight operations involving the space shuttle launch vehicle and ground systems. He was also assigned to the engineering leadership team for Space Shuttle Columbia, with responsibilities that included briefing the flight crew prior to launch.

His earlier space program roles included:

• Leading the Launch Countdown Simulation team and developing high-fidelity simulations used to train the entire launch team.
• Serving as simulation lead for the Mission Management Team and training Space Shuttle Program leadership.
• Working as a fuel cell system engineer responsible for testing and checkout of electrical power, water generation and payload support systems aboard the space shuttle orbiter.
• Interning in space center operations and engineering for Pan Am World Services at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base.

Before beginning his career in the space program, Mike worked in education as both a high school teacher and private tutor. That early experience complements a career spent explaining, training, communicating and helping people understand complex subjects.

From NASA experience to your organization

When organizations book Mike Ciannilli, they gain access to insights developed in environments where preparation, teamwork, communication and decision-making carried extraordinary consequences. His stories reveal what can happen when organizations learn effectively from failure and what is required to keep hard-earned lessons alive as teams, leaders and circumstances change.

Mike's presentations can open conversations around leadership, safety, organizational culture, risk, decision-making, teamwork, failure, resilience, learning and mission success. Rather than treating these themes as abstract management concepts, he brings them to life through experiences from launch countdowns, simulations, engineering operations, accident recovery, historical preservation and decades of collaboration with NASA teams and leaders.

Throughout his career, Mike has received numerous honors, including the Silver Snoopy, NASA Exceptional Service Medal, NASA Quest Outreach Award, Launch and Landing Leadership Award, Launch Countdown Simulation Contingency Leadership Award and Columbia Recovery Team Award, among many others.

Mike Ciannilli holds a Bachelor of Science in space science from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. He grew up in Syracuse, New York, and his passion for the space program has remained a defining thread throughout his life. Outside his professional work, he enjoys spending time with his family, surfing, boating, hiking, skiing and film and television production.

Book Mike Ciannilli for your event to give audiences a rare look inside America's space program and the enduring lessons it offers about people, leadership, failure, responsibility and the pursuit of mission success.