Mark Schaffer is the Vice President of Advanced Development at SpaceWorks. His experience includes both technical and leadership roles on the company’s hypersonic flight, space launch system, and space exploration projects. Mr. Schaffer serves as the concept development lead for SpaceWorks’ engineering support of the AFRL Aerospace Systems Directorate’s ongoing hypersonics technology maturation programs. He previously served as PI for a DARPA-funded project to advance the design of a sustainable and evolvable platform to provide persistent payload hosting capabilities in GEO. Mr. Schaffer also served as an analysis team technical lead on the joint NASA-DARPA Horizontal Launch Study.Mr. Schaffer’s technical expertise is in conceptual design, trajectory optimization, performance assessment, flight dynamics characterization, and multidisciplinary design & optimization of aerospace systems including hypersonic aircraft, Earth-to-orbit launch systems, robotic spacecraft, and human spaceflight vehicles.Mr. Schaffer received his Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. He is a Senior Member of AIAA and has authored conference papers for the AIAA Space Forum, the International Astronautical Congress, and other aerospace industry meetings.