Roxanna Pakkar grew up in space hardware’s backyard—on the west side of LA, where her high school robotics team sought mentorship from engineers at nearby Boeing, Raytheon, and SpaceX facilities.
Heading to USC for college, she found herself more deeply enmeshed in the space industry. She studied robotics and won an internship at JPL after designing a prototype system for underwater automatons to communicate using Bluetooth technology.
Now she works just down the coast in Long Beach as a technical project manager at Rocket Lab, helping develop software for the company’s line of spacecraft, which tackle everything from scientific research to military reconnaissance.
Path to PM: After earning a master’s from USC, she took a job at the Aerospace Corporation, the federal research center. There, she pitched an idea for a new kind of robotics lab—one that took advantage of augmented reality technology to rapidly iterate.
“It’s a lot easier to simulate multiple drones when you’re wearing a VR headset versus actually having drones in the lab,” she said. Building out the project clued her into something important: “I realized that I think what I like the most about research experience was the [project management] side of the work.”
She jumped to Parallel Systems, an advanced rail transportation start-up founded by former SpaceX engineers, before landing at Rocket Lab in April. “I really want to work on things where the end product is something that really excites me, and I find space consistently triggers that for me. I’ve kind of bounced around but always made my way back here,” she said.
Pay it forward: Nihar Agrawal, software engineer at Aalyria and fellow 2024 Pioneer, nominated Pakkar for her groundbreaking work, but also her commitment to community—even as a first-year college student, she “loved talking about how furthering the space industry required more than just technical innovations.”
That led Pakkar to volunteer for outreach programs for students in south central Los Angeles and share her experience in aerospace with young people, encouraging a passion for science and technology.
