Tag: mission design
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The EP Mafia Part 3
Lineage Life often takes a crooked, wandering, indirect path. And at the end of a journey, one often ends at a destination quite far from where they had set out to reach. This is one of those stories. We will begin, strangely, with Mikhail Gorbachev. In the twilight of the Soviet Union, Mr. Gorbachev championed…
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Do You Get It?
I joined the PPE Mission Design team in May of 2020. At that time, I was just the third full time member of the team and I had exactly zero experience in trajectory design and optimization. I did, however, have experience in systems analysis and a pretty good understanding of how to apply the rocket…
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The EP Mafia: Part 2
The German Today, we live in a golden era of electric propulsion. Thousands of hall effect thrusters currently inhabit space (thanks in no small part due to the comical numbers of Starlink satellites), ion thrusters have demonstrated exceptional performance in deep space, and soon the PPE will demonstrate humanity’s first high-powered on-orbit EP system with…
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The EP Mafia
Part 1: The Hammer and the Nail When I joined the Power and Propulsion Element Mission Design Team in May of 2020 (yes, during the pandemic), it seemed natural that trajectory design work was going on at NASA Glenn. Why wouldn’t it? And of course Glenn Research Center (GRC) was managing the PPE project, that…
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Steely Eyed Missile Man
One of my favorite novels is Andy Weir’s The Martian. It was recommended to me when I was in high school by a family friend who worked (and still works) at NASA Glenn Research Center. I immediately fell in love with the book. To me, it captured everything that I thought NASA stood for. Perseverance,…
Plotting the Course 