Team

The people behind Luthien Space.

A small team building the intelligence backbone for lunar landings, robotics, and resource missions.

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Tammy Payne

Founder and CEO of Luthien Space Systems. Tammy is building the company to give lunar operators the intelligence backbone the industry never had, turning fragmented planetary science into decisions worth staking a billion-dollar mission on. Under her leadership, Luthien is tracking NASA SBIR opportunities across Ames, Glenn, and Langley from FY25 to FY29, spanning $251K feasibility studies through $500M mission-scale programs.

She brings 10+ years leading complex cybersecurity, PMO, and implementation programs across healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and government. At XTIUM/ATSG she drove 30% cybersecurity MRR growth and led the firm's first Cisco XDR managed service. At Xentaurs she led implementation of the first scalable Epic segmentation reference architecture on Cisco Tetration, generated $1.5M in incremental business, and was named Project Manager of the Year and Employee of the Year in back-to-back years.

Chief Science Data Officer

Benjamin McKeeby

Chief Science Data Officer at Luthien Space. Ben leads the science side of the intelligence stack, turning raw NASA LRO observations into decisions operators can build landings, traverses, and infrastructure on.

He architected Luthien's joint thermal infrared and radar surface inversion pipeline. It is the only orbital lunar surface characterization system of its kind validated against returned lunar samples from Apollo 15 and Chang'e-5. The pipeline retrieves grain size, porosity, roughness, and rock abundance across the lunar surface, feeding landing site analysis, traverse planning, ISRU feasibility, and infrastructure siting.

EVP, PMO & Process Design

Katherine Cote

Executive Vice President of PMO and Process Design at Luthien Space. As a founding-team hire, Katherine owns the operating framework that carries the company's portfolio governance, delivery cadence, and cross-functional coordination. Her work turns strategy into scheduled, defensible execution.

Before Luthien Space, she led delivery of security and infrastructure initiatives at her prior company, including zero-trust and remote-access rollouts, owning the plan end to end and keeping technical teams aligned. Her toolkit spans Certified Scrum Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Business Process Engineer credentials, sharpened across regulated and government-adjacent environments where delivery discipline is not optional.

Senior Director, Knowledge Management

Holly Riley

Senior Director of Knowledge Management at Luthien Space. Holly owns the content infrastructure that carries the company's funding pipeline, external presence, and internal operating knowledge. Her work turns institutional memory into a searchable, teachable asset.

A decade at Apple as a certified corporate facilitator gave her the teaching craft. She later stood up LPL Financial's first enterprise knowledge base from scratch: 1,100+ articles and 350 video tutorials, tested at 4x the industry standard for AI effectiveness, with measurable reduction in Service Desk call volume across a 13,000-person organization.

Comms, Historian & Culture

Julie Miles

Julie leads Comms, Historian, and Culture at Luthien Space. She shapes how the company talks about itself, preserves the record of what it has built and why, and stewards the culture that carries a founding-stage team through hard technical work.

Her role sits at the intersection of narrative discipline, institutional memory, and team identity. Externally, she owns the voice: how Luthien reads to funders, partners, and the operators buying billion-dollar programs. Internally, she keeps the origin story legible and the values durable as new hires join and the company scales.

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