WASHINGTON — Grant Anderson was appointed president and chief executive of Paragon Space Development Corp., the Tucson, Arizona-based company said Nov. 3.
The move is a promotion for Anderson, who has been with the company since its founding in 1993 and was most recently its chief operating officer.
Anderson succeeds Jane Poynter, former Paragon chief executive, and Taber MacCallum, former Paragon president. Poynter and MacCallum resigned to work full time at World View Enterprises of Las Vegas, a Paragon spinoff created in 2013. World View is planning to market stratospheric balloon rides for tourists and researchers around 2016 using Paragon-developed technology.
Paragon Space Development specializes in life-support and thermal control systems for space applications. The company provided the pressurized suit worn by Google executive Alan Eustace during his record-breaking high-altitude parachute jump Oct. 24 from a World View balloon. Paragon has also worked on life-support systems for Boeing Space Exploration’s CST-100 capsule, one of the two systems NASA is funding under its commercial crew program, and with NASA itself for portions of the life-support system that will eventually be used on the Lockheed Martin-built Orion deep-space capsule.
