Sita Sonty joined AlixPartners in late summer 2024, but had one last piece of business to attend to at her old job.
She managed payload operations from the ground for the launch of a Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida to the International Space Station on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The shuttle was carrying a research payload built by Space Tango–the company Sita led as CEO, which is a pioneer in automated in-orbit manufacturing and data services.
It was the 12th launch Sita had witnessed prior to joining the AlixPartners Aerospace, Defense, and Aviation practice as Partner & Managing Director. “It’s a lot, that’s true,” she admitted, “but it's not enough!” Space travel simply does not get old.
The sight of a launch vehicle blazing toward the exosphere from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center carrying a cargo ship manufactured by one commercial aerospace company and payload manufactured by another encapsulates the powerful convergence of Sita’s career phases. There was her work with the Department of State in conflict zones such as Iraq and Libya; in industry with SpaceX, where she was Head of Human Spaceflight, and at Sierra Nevada Corporation, where she helped build the global Foreign Military Sales pipeline and spin out the Sierra Space business; and finally her deployment to consulting, where she would bring her expeditionary problem-solving mindset to client challenges.
Taking startup culture to space
“The knowledge of how to be market-facing with space and satellite technology is a pretty unique beast,” explains Sita. As Senior Advisor of Political-Military Affairs with the Department of State, she was used to negotiating military contracts with aerospace and defense (A&D) companies. The challenges of space technology are similar in a lot of ways to those of A&D, she says … it’s just a longer trip.
“Because it's traveling farther, there's higher risk,” says Sita. “There's a higher risk of spontaneous explosions, which you actually assume as part of failure tolerance in the space and satellite industry." There is also a higher bar for capital to enable successful technology to reach maturation, let alone become marketable. Startup culture is about “doing more with less and that means less resources, but it also means less knowledge. We don't know if this thing is going to work or not. We don't know if the technology is going to function,” she explains.
Tolerance for such unknowns has been key to Sita’s career, whether she was in conflict zones, working for a startup, or tackling client work. She has also been driven by a focus on emotional connection, going beyond the data to understand someone else’s intent. “It's a different way of learning and reflecting and it's something that I've subscribed to and I would argue is why I'm still alive after all the high-risk environments I've been in,” says Sita, who is still in touch with her colleagues from Iraq, 20 years later.
“I was in Cairo in 2003 and Baghdad in 2004 and then Damascus in 2005/06 and Libya in 2007-09”; experiences that taught her to serve in active- and post-conflict zones with an eye to the question of how “technology can unlock greater innovation and greater economic trade.”
That work led to higher-level executive service negotiating contracts with global defense agencies and policy authorities–for example, getting approval for the sale of a large A&D platform to the U.S. government and allies, and global commercial customers. Internal stakeholder management was as important and required a high level of emotional intelligence. Eventually, she was recruited by the aerospace company Raytheon Technologies, and was pulled into her current orbit from there.
Agility, no matter the environment
Sita describes her upbringing as “pluralistic,” spending time in grade school in Hyderabad in Southern India and also in Chicago in the U.S. Having moved between places and languages, she felt confident that she was culturally agile enough to serve overseas as a diplomat. Her thinking was: “I can learn Arabic and I'll fit in Cairo; if I add value, I will volunteer.” She sat and passed the foreign service exam on her first try within the 30 days of beginning her studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she earned a Master’s in International Relations and International Economics. “That was the nature of service.”
She speaks Telugu, English, Hindi, French, Arabic, Croatian, and Urdu, and now serves in board and council roles with Women in Aerospace, the Johns Hopkins University President’s Alumni Council, and the Washington Leadership Program, and as a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. She is also proud of her family—she is a single mom with a teenaged daughter and son.
Her move to AlixPartners has gone smoothly, in part because she has met a culture equally predisposed to agility. “The fact that AlixPartners recruits people with tremendous operational experience shows in spades,” she says. “It creates a seamless pathway for integration.”
Sita was recruited to the firm by people equally passionate about deep-space exploration (“I love Lisa Donahue, [AlixPartners’ co-head of the Americas/Asia] to space,” she says), and is keen to employ her knowledge and skillset for clients in the aerospace industry.
She is also following with interest as her old stomping grounds push farther into the future.
Once the Cygnus rocket reached the International Space Station (NASA retired the Space Shuttle Program in 2011), it was captured by one of the astronauts, using a boom arm off the station, and will remain connected for several months, delivering 8,600 pounds of supplies, cutting-edge research materials, and personal effects like letters from home for the crew.
The Cygnus rocket is Sita’s favorite spacecraft because Northrop is deploying a double-barrel variant. “It’s a greater innovation from a big space prime [contractor], with greater payload capacity, great flight heritage, and much of it is made in and launches from Virginia,” she says, speaking from AlixPartners’ D.C. office.
There’s nowhere she would rather be.