Carlos Garcia-Galan, a 27-year veteran of the space industry, has been appointed deputy manager for the Gateway program at NASA.

The agency said Thursday Garcia-Galan will leverage his extensive experience in human spaceflight in his new role.

Garcia-Galan spent the majority of his career at NASA. He most recently served as manager of the Orion program's European Service Module. He was also deputy manager of the Orion Vehicle Integration Office and multi-purpose crew vehicle mission and systems integration lead for over six years.

He additionally served as deputy manager of the Orion Mission & Systems Integration where he provided technical leadership for the team responsible for Orion's fault management system, mission event sequencing and other critical tasks. He oversaw the Orion HW/SW System Integration Team, responsible for the integration of various vehicle subsystems.

Garcia-Galan served as International Space Station flight controller for over four years where he was the increment operations lead for NASA's Mission Operations directorate. He also worked as the deputy system manager of the Orion VSM.

Before his 18-year run with NASA, Garcia-Galan worked at Honeywell for six years. He started his career in 1997 as a NASA flight controller, a role he held until 2001.

Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, said of Garcia-Galan, "His wealth of experience in human spaceflight, international partnerships and the development and operations of deep-space spacecraft will be a huge asset to Gateway."

Gateway Program Manager Jon Olansen, added, "Carlos brings a tremendous technical background and extensive leadership experience that will greatly benefit our program, augmenting our strong team as we progress towards deploying the lunar Gateway."