Gregg E. Maryniak, Chief Operating Officer and Director of Education of the X PRIZESM Foundation, was awarded the Tsiolkovsky Medal in a ceremony in Vienna, Austria on July 15, 1996. The Tsiolkovsky Medal, named after Konstantine Edwardovich Tsiolkovsky (pictured at right), the Father of Spaceflight, was presented to Mr. Maryniak in recognition of his work on the use of the resources of free space and his international lectures on the work of Tsiolkovsky. The medal and certificate were presented by Dr. Vladimir Lytkin of the Tsiolkovsky Museum of Kaluga, Russia (the birthplace of Tsiolkovsky) at a special ceremony at the International Space University hosted by the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. In addition to leading the X Prize Foundation's education programs, Maryniak is a Trustee of the International Space University and a Director of the Space Studies Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. He led the development of the Lunar Prospector, a low cost space probe which will provide the first complete geochemical map of the lunar surface and search for ice in the permanently shadowed regions of the moon. The Lunar Prospector spacecraft is currently under construction by the Lockheed Martin Corporation and is scheduled for launch by NASA in 1997. He is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was named an AIAA Distinguished Lecturer in 1991 for his presentation, "The Harvest of Space." Maryniak recently authored a paper which appeared in the May issue of Space Policy comparing the Tsiolkovsky paradigm for the development of free space with the planetary surface emphasis of Von Braun.
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