Jean de Lafontaine

Biography

Jean de Lafontaine is President and founder of NGC Aerospace Ltd, and Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. He graduated in engineering physics at the Royal Military College (Kingston, Canada) and obtained his PhD in aerospace engineering at the University of Toronto. From 1982 to 1986, he worked for the Canadian Government on the development of a military satellite project. From 1986 to 1996, he was employed with the European Space Agency (ESA) as a satellite system engineer both at ESA and at the NASDA Tsukuba Space Centre near Tokyo (now JAXA). Jean returned to Canada in 1996, became a professor at the electrical and computer engineering department of the Université de Sherbrooke and founded his company NGC Aerospace Ltd. As the president of his flourishing company NGC Aerospace Ltd, Jean currently manages a number of space projects with the European Space Agency, the Canadian Space Agency and various aerospace companies. He also continues to teach control system theory as a professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. One of his many achievements was the development of the flight code for the PROBA-1 spacecraft (launched in 2001), the first fully autonomous and automatically-generated guidance, navigation and control software to be flown by the European Space Agency. The innovative PROBA design philosophy has been extended to the PROBA-2 (launched in 2009), PROBA-V and PROBA-3 spacecraft as well as planetary exploration vehicles to the Moon and Mars.