Steve Rader

Steve Rader currently serves as the deputy manager for NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) and is one of 20 Challenge Mentors for U.S. Government Services Administration’s (GSA) Prizes and Challenges government-wide community of practice. Steve has worked with various projects and organizations to develop and/or execute over 60 different challenges for NASA organizations and other federal agencies. He speaks regularly about NASA’s work in crowd-based challenges both publicly and internally to the NASA workforce to promote the use of open innovation tools.

Mr. Rader has mechanical engineering degree from Rice University and has worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX for over 25 years. He started his career as an environmental control and life support systems flight controller for Space Station Operations. Mr. Rader moved into flight software engineering where he developed delay tolerant communications software for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station as wells as ground and flight command & control systems for the X-38 emergency crew return vehicle. Mr. Rader led the development of NASA’s Constellation Program’s Interoperable Command, Control, Communications & Information (C3I) architecture. More recently, Mr. Rader supported the Mars design reference mission definition and a number of analog missions studying space mission operations and design. Mr. Rader began studying crowdsourcing communities in 2011 and joined the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation as the deputy manager in 2013.