Pierre Lods

Born 10 July 1958 in Paris, Pierre Lods graduated from ENSERG, the French national electronics and radioelectricity school in Grenoble, in 1981 and obtained a master’s degree in information processing from the ENSAE national aerospace school in 1982.

After doing his year of compulsory scientific service in the Information Technology Design and Research department at the ONERA national aerospace laboratory’s Toulouse research centre (CERT), he joined CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre in 1983, where he worked on development of control centres for the TDF satellites and then on the design of the control centre for the HERMES space shuttle.

In 1989, he was seconded to the Guiana Space Centre, where he occupied a series of management positions covering the domain of tracking and telemetry for the Ariane launcher.

Pierre Lods returned to the Toulouse Space Centre in 1994, pursuing his career in the field of satellite ground control and operations segments, specifically for the SPOT and Helios Earth-observation satellites and then scientific missions built around the Proteus and Myriade series of spacecraft buses.

Appointed Senior Expert and Deputy Director of CNES’s Operations Sub-Directorate in 2008, Pierre Lods notably supervised operations to position the satellites of the Galileo constellation. He played a key role in the SpaceOps global space operators organization, of which he was appointed co-chair in 2016. He was subsequently tasked with assuring the security of space systems operated by CNES, and this gradually became his main focus working with national and European security authorities.

On 1 September 2017, Pierre Lods took over from Bernard Luciani as CNES’s Director of Central Security and Defence Security Officer.