Pablo de León

Pablo Gabriel de León (born November 12, 1964) is an Argentine Space Suit Researcher, born in Cañuelas, Argentina.

Pablo de León

He was the team leader of the Ansari X Prize Team based in Buenos Aires[1] and the payload manager of Project PADE, a group of seven Argentine experiments flown in the NASA Space Shuttle Endeavour in STS-108 mission, in December 2001.[2]

De León is the founder of the Argentine Association of Space Technology and one of the co-founders of the Latin American Space Association.

He was the director of the Space Suit Laboratory at the Department of Space Studies, University of North Dakota[3] and as such he is in charge of several NASA-sponsored projects in space suit systems and human space flight.[4]

In 2006 was the payload manager for the Pehuensat-1 satellite.[5] An educational project managed by the Universidad Nacional del Comahue, in Neuquen, Argentina. The satellite was launched on board ISRO's PSLV rocket on January 10, 2007.[6]

In 2008 Pablo de León presented the book "Historia de la Actividad Espacial en Argentina", volume 1, ISBN 978-987-05-4745-7 which accounts the history of the space activities in Argentina from 1930 to 1980. The same year he received the Orden de Merito Newberiano medal, given by the Instituto Nacional Newberiano, the aerospace history institute of Argentina.

De León developed a dust-repelling fabric together with Kavya Manyapu to be used in space suits.[7] The fabric was launched into space on the MISSE-11 mission for testing in April 2019.[8]