![]() Sitting in mission control after an explosion trying to work out what happened was very stressful. In the early days, far too many rockets exploded. ![]() It’s always exciting, and sometimes terrifying! From the moment the rocket lifts off there’s nothing anyone can do, you just have to watch. How does it feel to be the person responsible for landing Falcon 9? It was this foundation in General Engineering ( Parts 1A and 1B), coupled with the ability to conduct novel research in my particular field, that enabled me to do my job as SpaceX’s Principal Rocket Landing Engineer.įalcon 9 – the ideal trajectory. I was thankful to be able to lean on the General Engineering that I had learned at Cambridge. This started out as mainly a GNC problem, but the scope quickly expanded once we realised we needed to make significant hardware changes to the rocket in order to make it land. This became my job: figuring out how to turn a rocket – that only went up into space in one piece – into a rocket that could come back to Earth and be reused like an aircraft. To achieve this, SpaceX needed someone who understood how rocket landing worked (and in particular, someone with knowledge of precision rocket landing). It was already highly optimised for going into space, but not for coming back to Earth. In around 2010, I heard that SpaceX was interested in making their new rocket reusable. This required new developments in the field of Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC), which I specialised in at Cambridge and later in my PhD at MIT. The idea was to give a Mars lander the sensors and algorithms it required to work out where it is and how to get to where it needs to be. My colleagues and I developed new techniques for precision landing on Mars. I first became interested in rocket landing while working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. We caught up with Lars for a chat about the world of precision rocket landing, his career to date, and why internships are so important. The destination? The Moon and Mars, of course! He is responsible for the entry, descent and landing of the rocket and his next project will see him leading the entry and landing for Starship – SpaceX’s next-generation, fully reusable rocket with room for up to 100 passengers. ![]() Lars is currently the Principal Rocket Landing Engineer for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 – the first orbital class rocket capable of reflight. It was this foundation in General Engineering (Parts 1A and 1B), coupled with the ability to conduct novel research in my particular field, that enabled me to do my job as SpaceX’s Principal Rocket Landing Engineer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |