Ron Jones was born and raised in California’s Silicon Valley in the shadow of NASA’s Ames Research Center. His earliest memory in life was watching Sputnik fly over with his dad which kindled an early interest in astronomy and anything “space.”
His first job, as a NASA high school intern, was in NASA’s lunar impact laboratory. As a college intern, he was an R&D Technician maintaining NASA’s 12” aperture Lear Jet flying Infrared Observatory. When that internship ended, he went to work for a contractor aboard NASA’s 36” aperture Kuiper Airborne Observatory, the largest facility of its kind in the world, as an Astronomical Specialist and tracking systems operator.
At 29, he left the Bay Area to go work on the Space Shuttle program for Martin Marietta Corporation at Vandenberg Air Force Base’s SLC-6 complex. When the Challenger accident forced the Air Force out of manned space, he went to Rockwell International in Los Angeles to help build Space Shuttle Endeavour, Challengers replacement. While at Rockwell, he was recruited into the Advanced Programs group where he worked on lunar and Mars mission trade studies in support of then-President George Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) and garnered international attention for creating the Integrated Space Plan (ISP), still today accepted as the definitive long-range vision for human expansion into space.
It was the ISP that caught the attention of Dr. Buzz Aldrin back in 1988 and was the catalyst that sparked a long-term friendship and working relationship. Ron was a founder and first Executive Director of Buzz’s nonprofit ShareSpace Foundation, created to accelerate the growth of commercial space and, at the same time, create a highly participatory "citizens" space program.
In the late ‘90s in Washington D.C., Ron and Buzz were intimately involved in laying the groundwork for the flight of the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, and the initiation of the space tourism industry.
While on the east coast, Ron met early commercial space pioneer John Cassano of ITA and became involved with flying small scientific payloads to space aboard the Space Shuttle. In 2010 they formally partnered up and created BioSpace Experiments to fly student experiments and small commercial payloads to the International Space Station which they did until the space shuttle was retired.
Today Ron supports fighter jet aircraft production at Boeing in St. Louis and is a member of the Board of Directors of the St. Louis Space Frontier, the St. Louis chapter of the National Space Society.
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