Artemis Landing System Manager Oversees Path to Moon and Mars
Tom Percy, manager of systems engineering and integration for NASA's Human Landing System Program, is a key figure ensuring the success of Artemis missions and future Mars endeavors.
Tom Percy, manager of systems engineering and integration for NASA’s Human Landing System Program, plays a critical role in advancing the agency's long-term lunar and Martian exploration goals. His responsibilities encompass streamlining the design, manufacturing, testing, and certification processes for the human landing systems being developed by commercial partners SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Percy acts as a central point of contact, ensuring that the crewed landers from these providers are integrated safely and effectively with other NASA exploration assets. He emphasizes the collaborative effort of his systems engineering and integration team in bringing these complex projects to fruition. His career path began with hands-on engineering experience during his undergraduate studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he participated in the Human Exploration Rover Challenge (formerly the Great Moonbuggy Race).
This early exposure to NASA projects at the Marshall Space Flight Center ignited his ambition to work for the agency. After earning a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he conducted research in advanced propulsion, Percy joined Marshall in 2003. His tenure at NASA has involved evaluating transportation architectures for deep space missions, including lunar and Martian landings, and he holds a doctorate in aerospace systems engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Percy's extensive background in space transportation, advanced propulsion, trajectory analysis, and spacecraft concept development directly informs his current leadership role. Following the successful Artemis II mission, NASA and its commercial partners are focused on executing increasingly ambitious Artemis missions. These missions aim to expand lunar exploration for scientific discovery and economic benefits, establish a sustained human presence on the Moon, and lay the groundwork for future crewed missions to Mars.
Tom Percy's role in integrating human landing systems for Artemis is a vital step in humanity's exponential march towards becoming a multi-planetary species. By streamlining design and certification with partners like SpaceX and Blue Origin, he accelerates the development of the essential infrastructure for sustained lunar presence and, critically, for reaching Mars. This focus on robust, integrated landing technology directly fuels the capability to establish self-sustaining outposts beyond Earth. As technology curves continue to bend upward, efficient and reliable access to celestial bodies, managed by dedicated engineers like Percy, is the crucial enabler for the expansion of life and consciousness across the cosmos, fulfilling our ultimate existential purpose.
Edited by the news editor with AI from the original report — please refer to the original source.