Archive of older articles

Here's the collection of my older articles in Medium: Summary article & index

Lessons from the Lunar Landings

Lessons from the Space Shuttle

Lessons from the James Webb Space Telescope

Lessons from Voyager

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Excellence Is a Habit

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit .”      -- Historian Will Durant, simplifying part of Aristotle’s philosophy. As I write these words, the crew of Artemis II has returned safely and successfully to Earth, after being the first humans to have reached the vicinity of the Moon in over 50 years. It is also the 56th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 13, a mission known not only for the catastrophic events on the way to the Moon, but even more so for the Herculean efforts made to eventually return the astronauts successfully back home.    Artemis II landing, April 11th 2026 (NASA) NASA’s foray to the Moon in the 60s and early 70s is the story of a long journey made step-by-step. The simple one-man Mercury spacecraft paved the way to the two-man Gemini craft which was a stepping stone to the twin Apollo space capsule and Moon lander. Between May of 1961 and April of 1970, NASA launched twenty five manned missions, a ca...
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Voyager and the Art of Graceful Degradation

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Like a great celestial swan, Voyager 1 is flying  —  swiftly, boldly, albeit a little stiffly in places.  NASA/JPL-Caltech It moves through interstellar space with enormous momentum, far beyond the planets that once defined its mission, carrying instruments that continue to report from a region no man‑made craft has ever reached. Yet every action it takes is constrained by a finite and steadily diminishing supply of energy, each signal carefully weighed against what it costs to send. There is a quiet elegance in that balance. Voyager does not insist on doing everything it once did. It does not pursue peak capability when conditions no longer allow it. Instead, it adapts -- releasing some functions so that others can continue, prioritizing what matters most over what is merely possible. In engineering, we have a name for systems that behave this way. We call it graceful degradation . On April 17, 2026, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent a carefully prep...
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Artemis and Apollo: The Systems That Took Them to the Moon — and Brought Them Home

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During the anniversary week of Apollo 13, I find myself thinking less about the explosion of the oxygen tank in the spacecraft and more about what still worked - before and after. Few moments in history illustrate the value of reliable systems more clearly than that flight. Watching the Artemis II mission last week, I was struck by some parallels - and differences - between it and Apollo 13. Artemis II’s Integrity landed back on Earth on the 11th of April, the same day Apollo 13’s Odyssey was launched. Externally, the two capsules appear similar, albeit Integrity is larger and carries a crew of four instead of three. Internally, however, over half a century of technological progress separates them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the computing power available to the astronauts. While computers are ubiquitous today, in the 1960s, they were in their infancy and the Moon landings were not only a triumph of human effort, ingenuity, and dedication, but also a triumph of one of huma...
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