Barbie Medina

Barbie Medina serves as a key procurement professional at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, supporting the acquisition of advanced space systems and scientific instrumentation critical to Earth observation and deep-space missions. She manages complex contracts for the development, integration, and testing of specialized space vehicle components and auxiliary equipment, ensuring alignment with NASA’s strategic goals in climate science, planetary exploration, and space telecommunications. Her work directly enables the deployment of high-precision sensors, avionics, and communication payloads aboard orbiting observatories and interplanetary spacecraft, requiring rigorous technical oversight and compliance with federal aerospace procurement standards. Medina maintains enduring partnerships with elite technical organizations including Aerospace & Commercial Technologies, LLC, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, leveraging their expertise in spacecraft subsystems, guidance systems, and space-qualified electronics. These relationships are characterized by long-term collaboration on mission-critical R&D and production efforts, often involving technical specifications beyond commercial off-the-shelf capabilities. Her contracting approach emphasizes performance-based requirements, systems engineering integration, and adherence to NASA’s stringent quality and reliability protocols for spaceflight hardware. Her procurement portfolio shows no reliance on socioeconomic set-asides, with 100% of awards issued under full and open competition. This reflects a focus on technical excellence and mission readiness over socioeconomic preferences, prioritizing vendor capability and proven spaceflight heritage. While small business participation is not formally incentivized in her portfolio, vendors are evaluated on technical merit, past performance, and systems integration capacity. Medina’s primary focus is on NAICS 336419—Other Guided Missile and Space Vehicle Parts and Auxiliary Equipment Manufacturing—procuring custom-built space-grade components such as attitude control systems, radiation-hardened electronics, thermal management units, and payload interface hardware. Her domain expertise spans spacecraft bus systems, sensor integration, and space-environment qualification, supporting missions that demand extreme reliability and precision in harsh orbital and deep-space conditions.