John Muratore
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Muratore was an influential NASA engineer and Program Manager, well known in the aerospace circles for his flamboyant and unconventional style.
He earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1979 from Yale University and a Master of Science in Computer Science in 1988 from the University of Houston–Clear Lake. After serving in the US Air Force, Mr. Muratore joined NASA JSC in 1983 and has held progressively responsible leadership positions including Chief, Reconfiguration Management Division, Space Shuttle Flight Director, and Chief, Control Center Systems Division in the Mission Operations Directorate; and Associate Director and Deputy Manager, Advance Development Office and Assistant to the Director, Engineering within the Engineering Directorate.
From 1996 to 2003, he was the Program Manager of the X-38 program, an unmanned demonstrator which performed a series of successful demonstration flights at Edwards Air Force Base. He gathered a team of young, relatively inexperienced but highly motivated engineers to try to apply the 'faster, better, cheaper' method advocated by Daniel Goldin to human spaceflight, in order for NASA to obtain at affordable cost a Crew Return Vehicle.
In 2003, following the cancellation of the X-38 program due to the International Space Station program financial woes, Mr. Muratore was named Manager, Space Shuttle Systems Engineering and Integration Office, Space Shuttle Program. Most recently he has served as Lead Engineer for the Space Shuttle Program.
In April 2006, following his technical opposition to Michael Griffin's decisions regarding the Shuttle return to flight, he was reassigned as Senior Systems Engineer supporting the Shuttle/Station Engineering Office in the Engineering Directorate.
In August of 2006, as part of NASA's outreach program, Muratore became an Adjunct Lecturer at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He taught graduate-level classes in Aerospace Systems Engineering and Introductory Flight Testing. Also while at Rice, Muratore advised an undergraduate Senior Design group tasked with creating an experiment to be flown on NASA's Weightless Wonder microgravity research aircraft. The purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate the feasibility of using the aircraft as a test-bed for commercial small-scale zero-gravity systems; testing of such systems in a 1 G environment requires costly simulators that cannot completely model micro- and zero-gravity environments. The Rice team, under the guidance of Muratore, showed that the NASA aircraft indeed was a viable platform for such testing, creating an impressive mock satellite in only two semesters with a very limited budget.
Muratore's experiences at Rice University inspired him to teach full-time. He is now a professor of Aviation Systems at the University of Tennessee Space Institute in Tullahoma, TN.
