An Engineer Whose Job Is to Find What NASA Doesn't Yet Know

Richard Spolzino, an aerospace engineer, works at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, within Moon Base's mission architecture and systems interoperability effort. His task is to help identify what NASA still doesn't know about the Moon and Mars, and to make sure that missing information gets found before it becomes a problem. It is a job defined by questions rather than hardware. The framing Spolzino offers for his own choices is about reach: he says it kept coming back to where he could have the most impact, where his work could touch the most things. “Systems interoperability” sounds like a footnote until you consider what an unanswered question costs when it surfaces far from the drawing board — which is the whole argument for finding it early.