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Mapping the Gaps in NASA’s Return to the Moon, featuring Richard Spolzino
“I want to be able to look at a rocket launch and say, ‘I touched a piece of this.’”
That’s how Richard Spolzino describes the thing he’s chasing. Not a title, not a specific mission, not even NASA itself, just the ability to point at something real and know his work made it possible. At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Spolzino works within Moon Base’s mission architecture and systems interoperability effort, helping identify what NASA still doesn’t know about the Moon and Mars, and making sure that missing information gets found before it becomes a problem.
“For me, it kept coming back to where can I have the most impact? Where can my work touch the most things?“
He started college as a history major. He switched to a physics track at Santa Clara University, thinking he’d end up in astrophysics. A research stint at Lick Observatory studying interstellar dust polarization taught him two things: the work was fascinating and, “I don’t think the staying-up-all-night thing is for me,” he says.
After graduation, he started down the path of Officer Candidate School in the Navy, hoping to fly jets. It didn’t pan out, and that detour led him to a graduate program at the University of Houston, combining aerospace engineering and space architecture — not the habitat-design kind of architecture people usually picture, but the systems-level kind, where a lunar oxygen plant connects to the rovers that feed it, which connect to the processor, which connects to the user drawing down the resource. “I was always more attracted to how all the pieces work together than to any single piece,” he says.
Ask Spolzino if he dreamed of working at NASA, and the honest answer is no.
“I really admire people who’ve had that drive their whole life,” he says. “For me, it kept coming back to where can I have the most impact? Where can my work touch the most things?” A University of Houston program with strong ties to Johnson Space Center put NASA on his radar alongside other options in industry and government. What ultimately drew him in wasn’t the agency’s name, it was the scope of the problems and the direct line he saw to senior decision-makers shaping the return to the Moon.
That’s also, he adds, exactly why NASA is worth considering for people who aren’t sure it’s their calling yet. The culture rewards people willing to take on more than their assigned lane and gives early-career employees room to grow into problems bigger than their job description, something he says he might not have found moving up more slowly in industry.
Spolzino’s day-to-day work centers on a deceptively simple idea: the data gap.
“You can think of it as synonymous with a knowledge gap,” he explains. “It’s a way of documenting the thing we don’t know.” Take the geotechnical properties of lunar regolith — moon dust, essentially, but the specifics matter enormously. How much weight can it bear? What’s its shear strength? Answering those questions shapes everything from how far a rover can safely drive to whether a habitat’s foundation will hold.