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When the Mars rover made its descent onto the Red Planet in 2004, Michael Logothetis ’94 watched with more than casual interest.
Logothetis was instrumental in ensuring the rover’s success. He had worked on the rocket system that helped slow the rover’s descent and on gas generators that inflated the airbags to cushion the spacecraft’s landing and allow it to bounce along the planet’s surface after it touched down.
“It was pretty cool,” he admits. “It was a great feeling — a very high high.”
Logothetis says he’s gotten used to the “so, you’re a rocket scientist” banter he encounters.
“It’s all part of the fun,” says the mechanical engineering graduate.
Logothetis admits it is an interesting field that grabs most people’s imagination.
However, he does not fit the mold of the stereotypical rocket scientist. Social and fit — he skis, and plays soccer and tennis — Logothetis is down to Earth when discussing how he got his position as an analytical engineer for Alliant Techsystems Propulsion and Controls in Elkton, Md.
“I applied for a job,” he says. “They needed an engineer to evaluate the conditions a rocket goes through during its lifetime.”
Logothetis typically works on one or two projects at a time, modeling and evaluating the performance of rocket systems.
“It only has to work once, but it has to work,” he says. “Being in this business requires a success rate in the 99th percentile. There is no repair shop in space.”
Logothetis benefited from two professors in particular at Lafayette. Michael Paolino of the mechanical engineering department helped him put things in context, he says. Steve Nesbit fueled the ideas of high performance in a design course. His work with fighter jets helped solidify the idea for Logothetis that mechanical engineering could be used to streamline engines to push them to the limit.
Logothetis says science is in his blood. His great-grandfather and grandfather graduated from West Point with engineering degrees. His father is a research chemist, his mother a chemist, and his sister a marine biologist.