Mr. Scott “Scotty” Van Sant served 20-years in the United States Air Force in various capacities from a Missile Combat Crew Commander at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota to an Undergraduate Space and Missile Instructor at Vandenberg AFB, CA to a Flight Commander in the 2^nd Space Launch Squadron working on the Delta-II, Atlas-II and Titan IV programs.  Following his time at Vandenberg, Scotty worked at Headquarters Air Force Space Command as a liaison to the commercial launch industry (Ask him about his interaction with Elon and Gwen in the early days of SpaceX). Scotty culminated his active-duty career at Headquarters U.S. Strategic Command wherein he had been the Operationally Responsive Space Project Officer, a liaison to NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Support Office following the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy and lastly an Executive Officer for the Global Strike Operations Directorate.

Upon retirement in 2011, Scotty accepted a government service position in the U.S. Strategic Command Plans and Policy Directorate to lead the revision of Joint Publication 3-14, Space Operations. From 2012-2023, he fronted and later managed the Command’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Data Sharing Program. Scotty’s team at USSTRATCOM, and later USSPACECOM, successfully negotiated SSA data sharing agreements with 33 mostly like-minded nations and 128 commercial companies. Later, academia was entrusted with this data and the team added seven universities to the list of SSA Agreement holders.  (The SSA Agreements are the first step in the Path to Partnership and the foundation for all DoD Space Engagement). From 2016-1019, Scotty directly contributed to the re-establishment of USSPACECOM and the National Space Defense Center through the Joint Space Doctrine and Tactics Forum, a monthly 12-Star engagement preparing the U.S. to fight and win a war in Space.

In 2022 at Cali’s Marco Fidel Suárez Air Base, Scotty was personally awarded the inaugural Ad Astra Medal from President Iván Duque for his efforts to progress the Colombian Air Force’s space domain awareness enterprise.

After leaving USSPACECOM, Scott and his wife Kristie, founded VS Consulting, LLC to link U.S. space industry to foreign partners.

In his spare time, Scotty enjoys the occasional fermented beverage and plays as much golf as he can in the short Nebraska summers. Scotty and Kristie have 17-year old boy-girl twins, Kyle and Katie and two exotic shorthairs, Truffle and Cosmo.