When it comes down to it, the space industry is about building stuff. That’s Alexa Villa’s specialty.
As the first technician—and now lead technician—for Apex Space, Villa leads the team of people who physically put together the company’s mass-manufacturable satellite buses. During the last year and a half that Villa has been at the company, she’s built a team of 10 technicians and led them through scaling Apex’s commercial satellite business.
“With bold vision and hands‑on expertise—and by designing modular workflows, bringing tooling in-house, and cross-training technicians—her [assembly, integration, and testing] team executes complete integration campaigns at speeds that far outpace conventional programs, all while maintaining uncompromised performance and reliability,” Alex Verrelli, VP of production at Apex, said about Villa.
Hands on: Villa has spent her career up close and personal with big flying things. She started off training, and then working for three years, as an aircraft assembler and technician at Bombardier in Canada. Then she made the jump to SpaceX, where she worked as a structure technician for none other than the Falcon 9 rocket. During her two-year tenure at SpaceX, she helped build more than 300 rockets.
“I was inside the tank, I was drilling, I was riveting, I was painting, sealing stuff together, everything. I was under, on top of the rocket, inside, like I know that rocket inside and out,” Villa said. “It’s like a third home.”
Top to bottom: As lead technician for Apex, Villa said it’s important for her to offer opinions on the satellite manufacturing process throughout the development timeline.
“I don’t want to just be a technician,” Villa said. “I just don’t want to just follow work orders…I want technicians to be known as, we do have ideas, and we do have really creative design aspects you want to incorporate. You can do integration work, or custom tooling, or be part of the review process and those things.”
