Lars Blackmore Senior Principal Mars Landing Engineer SpaceX

Lars Blackmore is the Senior Principal Mars Landing Engineer at SpaceX. In his role he and his team are tackling an array of new problems that will need to be solved for SpaceX to reach the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

He took on the role of Principal Mars Landing Engineer in 2018, and was promoted to Senior Principal in March 2020. From 2011 to 2018 he was responsible for Entry, Descent and Landing of the Falcon 9 rocket, as part of SpaceX's reusable launch vehicle program. His team developed the precision landing technology for the Grasshopper rocket, the F9R-Dev rocket, the F9 reusable booster stage and the Falcon Heavy boosters. Previously he was in the Guidance and Control Analysis Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, part of the California Institute of Technology, where he developed control and estimation algorithms for NASA's future space missions. He co-invented the G-FOLD algorithm for precision landing on Mars, and was part of the SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) mission, which launched in January 2015. Lars was named one of MIT Tech Review's "35 under 35" innovators and has a PhD in Guidance, Navigation and Control from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.