Fred Boelitz '86

Frederick Boelitz ’86 is a senior aerospace engineering executive with more than three decades of experience spanning autonomy, national defense, and commercial spaceflight. After earning his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986, he completed a master’s degree at MIT as a Draper Laboratory Technical Fellow. 

Boelitz began his career at Draper Laboratory, where he worked on a wide range of surface, marine, and aerospace systems. He went on to lead Draper’s Aerospace Control Group, overseeing advanced guidance and control efforts for complex, mission-critical platforms. During his time at Draper, he also supervised several MIT graduate students, including Nick Hague, who later became a NASA astronaut. 

In 2004, he joined Blue Origin, at the time a startup of 20 employees founded by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. He was the company's first Autonomy engineer and over more than two decades, Fred wrote flight software for every Blue Origin launch system prior to New Glenn and served as the technical lead for the Guidance and Control team. For New Glenn, he instead led a team of more than 130 engineers responsible for the design and implementation of all application-level autonomy software. He currently serves as Senior Director of New Glenn Software & System Controls, overseeing guidance and control, vehicle and ground autonomy, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and systems integration for Blue Origin’s orbital launch vehicle. 

Fred is an inventor on multiple U.S. patents related to flight control, trajectory optimization, and reusable launch vehicle systems, reflecting his long-standing contributions to autonomous and high-performance aerospace technologies. Today, he is the longest-tenured employee at Blue Origin aside from its founder. 

He maintains strong ties to UMass Amherst and remains deeply committed to mentorship and engineering education, crediting his undergraduate training in systems thinking and control fundamentals as foundational to his career.