SpaceX
Lars Blackmore is the Senior Principal Mars Landing Engineer at SpaceX. In his role he and his team are tackling an array of new problems that will need to be solved for SpaceX to reach the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
He took on the role of Principal Mars Landing Engineer in 2018, and was promoted to Senior Principal in March 2020. From 2011 to 2018 he was responsible for Entry, Descent and Landing of the Falcon 9 rocket, as part of SpaceX's reusable launch vehicle program. His team developed the precision landing technology for the Grasshopper rocket, the F9R-Dev rocket, the F9 reusable booster stage and the Falcon Heavy boosters. Previously he was in the Guidance and Control Analysis Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, part of the California Institute of Technology, where he developed control and estimation algorithms for NASA's future space missions. He co-invented the G-FOLD algorithm for precision landing on Mars, and was part of the SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) mission, which launched in January 2015. Lars was named one of MIT Tech Review's "35 under 35" innovators and has a PhD in Guidance, Navigation and Control from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
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SpaceX
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SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches the world’s most advanced rockets and spacecraft. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk to revolutionize space transportation, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary. SpaceX has gained worldwide attention for a series of historic milestones. It is the only private company ever to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit, which it first accomplished in December 2010. The company made history again in May 2012 when its Dragon spacecraft attached to the International Space Station, exchanged cargo payloads, and returned safely to Earth — a technically challenging feat previously accomplished only by governments. Since then Dragon has delivered cargo to and from the space station multiple times, providing regular cargo resupply missions for NASA. SpaceX believes a fully and rapidly reusable rocket is the pivotal breakthrough needed to substantially reduce the cost of space access. The majority of the launch cost comes from building the rocket, which historically has flown only once. Compare that to a commercial airliner – each new plane costs about the same as Falcon 9 but can fly multiple times per day and conduct tens of thousands of flights over its lifetime. Following the commercial model, a rapidly reusable space launch vehicle could reduce the cost of traveling to space by a hundredfold. While most rockets are designed to burn up on reentry, SpaceX rockets can not only withstand reentry but can also successfully land back on Earth and refly again. SpaceX’s family of Falcon launch vehicles are the first and only orbital class rockets capable of reflight. Depending on the performance required for the mission, Falcon lands on one of our autonomous spaceport droneships out on the ocean or one of our landing zones near our launch pads.