Gregg Maryniak is the Vice President, Energy and Aerospace of the St. Louis Science Center and Director of the James S. McDonnell Planetarium. He formerly served as Executive Director of the X PRIZE Foundation, Senior Scientist of the Futron Corporation, President of the Sunsat Energy Council and Chief Executive Officer of the Space Studies Institute of Princeton.
He is the Co-Chairman of the Department of Energy and Environment at Singularity University, hosted by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics named him a Distinguished Lecturer for his presentation, "The Harvest of Space."
In 1992, he led a two-month long international study conducted in Kitakyushu, Japan by researchers and students from more than 25 nations on the subject of solar energy. During 1992 and 1993, he coordinated the United States’ participation in the first space experiment that transferred energy from one spacecraft to another during flight. He received the Space Frontier Foundation’s Vision to Reality Award for his role in creating the Lunar Prospector Mission launched in 1998.
An instrument-rated multiengine commercial pilot with more than 40 years of flight experience, Maryniak was the Flight Director for Erik Lindbergh’s New Spirit of St. Louis flights in 2002. In 2006 he was the recipient of the St. Louis Flight Instructors Association’s James Byrnes Aviation Excellence Award.
He currently serves as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of the X PRIZE Foundation and Vice Chairman of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation.
