Olivier Ladislas de Weck

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT · Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Growth in the complexity of advanced systems is mirrored by a growth in the number of engineering requirements and related upstream and downstream tasks. These requirements are typically expressed in natural language and require human expertise to manage. Natural language processing (NLP) technology has long been seen as promising to increase requi...

An important step toward establishing a continuous human presence on Mars is identifying landing sites that are suitable for human and scientific exploration. A key driver of landing site selection is the quantity of water needed to sustain human life. However, minimal work beyond first-order water demand estimates has been completed to date. To ad...

While the Sun provides the Earth with the energy needed to sustain life, the volatility associated with this intense energy source generates solar weather, which can have devastating implications on Earth. Solar weather can result in data compromise, radio interference, premature satellite deorbit, and even failure of the power grid. To mitigate th...

The landscape of human Mars missions is being revolutionized by advancements in reusable space systems, prompting a shift from conventional, small-scale architectures to larger, more sustainable mission concepts. This study explores the potential of larger, multi-site Mars architectures, underpinned by increased crew sizes and longer mission durati...

We propose a ten-year Mars mission to establish Earth-independence and support efficient, safe, and sustainable science and exploration goals. The campaign begins with a series of precursor missions, starting with the Artemis program, followed by robotic missions to perform site surveys and selection, de-risk technologies, and to start stockpiling...

Local decisionmakers managing forests for sequestering carbon and mitigating disturbance face increasing pressures from climate change, while needing to derive revenue from forests resources and balance diverse stakeholder concerns. Decision support systems (DSS) that use freely available satellite data are effective tools for forest management dec...

The purpose of the study is to understand the design considerations for creating a provocative financial planning toolkit with services to help facilitate more constructive and meaningful conversations to build trust and empathy between financial advisors and senior people. We conducted four rounds of 60-minute co-creation workshops with eight invi...

Service design has been an emerging transdisciplinary field that includes product, system, and social science, since the term was first introduced to academic research in the early 1990s. With socioeconomical shifts and emerging technologies, people have faced more complex and systemic challenges, which enable researchers to consider how to reapply...

Spaceborne Earth Observation (EO) platforms have significantly expanded in the past decade, providing increased access to high-resolution and high-frequency data from various sensors, including optical sensors for Earth imagery. This paper conducts an empirical and quantitative characterization of technological trends that enable advancement in dat...

Im Mittelpunkt der Praxisstudie Roadmapping steht die Methode des Roadmapping als Methode der integrierten strategischen Planung von Produkten, Technologien, Prozessen, Dienstleistungen oder Geschäftsmodellen. Da die Inhalte und Einsatzbereiche von Roadmaps in der Praxis stark variieren, haben wir uns für die Praxisstudie Roadmapping das Ziel geset...

Roadmapping as a method for integrated strategic planning of products, technologies, processes, services, or business models is in the focus of the Roadmapping Field Study. Since the contents and areas of application of roadmaps vary greatly in practice, we set ourselves the goal for the Roadmapping Field Study of finding out how roadmapping is use...

The Yurok Tribe in northern California faces natural resource management challenges due to climate change-related drought and forest fires. Conversely, the Tribe is mitigating climate change impacts through forest carbon sequestration projects. The revenue from these carbon sequestration projects has promoted investments in natural resource managem...

Since the dawn of spaceflight, payload mass, or launched mass, has been used as the primary cost metric for mission-level trade studies. However, advances in the reusability and mass production of spacecraft have started decoupling mission cost from launched mass, leading us to consider novel metrics for trade studies and design of space systems. A...

The 2022 NASA BIG Idea Challenge invited teams to develop novel extreme lunar terrain mobility technologies in support of the Artemis program, setting only the constraint to not propose a wheeled robot. This paper proposes a platform for field-reconfigurable walking robots that can be tailored to multiple missions and even repaired in the field. De...

With the growth of residential rooftop PV adoption in recent decades, the problem of effective layout design has become increasingly important in recent years. Although a number of automated methods have been introduced, these tend to rely on simplifying assumptions and heuristics to improve computational tractability. We demonstrate a fully automa...

This paper describes the design, implementation, and field‐testing of a low‐cost autonomous control system on the Platform for Expanding Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) exploRation to Longer ranges (PEARL). PEARL is a floating, solar‐powered platform designed as a servicing station for AUVs. This paper describes the field testing of a prototyp...

This paper presents a method of planning spacecraft maneuvers for mobile target tracking. Agile, maneuverable spacecraft have been proposed as a means of modifying satellite orbits to observe discrete targets on the Earth on demand. This work adapts this concept to propose a method of using maneuverable spacecraft to observe a mobile target as it m...

Global solar photovoltaic capacity has consistently doubled every 18 months over the last two decades, going from 0.3 GW in 2000 to 643 GW in 2019, and is forecast to reach 4240 GW by 2040. However, these numbers are uncertain, and virtually all reporting on deployments lacks a unified source of either information or validation. In this paper, we p...

With the growth of residential rooftop PV adoption in recent decades, the problem of 1 effective layout design has become increasingly important in recent years. Although a number 2 of automated methods have been introduced, these tend to rely on simplifying assumptions and 3 heuristics to improve computational tractability. We demonstrate a fully...

Coastal flooding and land subsidence threaten Pekalongan City, Indonesia. These environmental phenomena impact coastal ecosystems and threaten agriculture and aquaculture industries. Satellite remote sensing (SRS) analyses can provide insights to better understand these environmental phenomena, and also provide inputs to local leaders' decision mak...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-4307.vid With the Artemis Program, NASA and its international and commercial partners are targeting not only a return to the Moon but also the development of technologies that would support a long-term sustainable presence. Technology development for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) of luna...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-4395.vid The Artemis Base Camp phase of NASA’s planned return to the Moon will feature extensive exploration and infrastructure development needs in and around extreme lunar terrain such as permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), lava tubes, cliffs and inclines, and highly porous regolith. In vie...

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-4315.vid BART & MARGE is a fully integrated, fully mobile architecture with no fixed centralized infrastructure to reliably produce large quantities of Methalox bipropellant by 2037 from thick ice sheets at the mid-northern latitudes of Mars. This architecture was designed for the 2022 RASC-AL...

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and field testing plans of a 1:2 Froude-scale prototype of a Platform for Expanding AUV exploRation to Longer ranges (PEARL). PEARL is an autonomous floating platform that utilizes renewable energy to recharge docked AUVs, while simultaneously uploading their mission data to a high-bandwidth low-Earth o...

In conjunction with the considerable growth of the space ecosystem over the past decade, manufacturing and design practices have evolved accordingly. The space industry is currently driven by a market pull: new and traditional actors are forced to develop technologies to meet market needs in a cost-effective and commercially viable manner. However,...

Throughout their life cycle, space launch vehicles impact their local and global environments on Earth and in space. Given the space industry’s projected growth, recent literature suggests that the atmospheric consequences of these activities are understudied and insufficiently addressed. Rockets uniquely emit combustion gases and particles into di...

In this final chapter, we look toward the more distant future of technology and humanity. We first ask if there are ultimate limits to technology. This brings us to the question of the so-called “singularity,” a prophesized point where technology becomes self-improving and outpaces human capabilities with the potential to render humans obsolete. Wh...

This is our second case study and it focuses on the development of heavier-than-air aircraft and the development of the civil air transportation system. The evolution of aircraft is impressive in terms of both performance and safety. Despite the fact that most commercial jet aircraft today look quite similar to the pioneering Boeing 707 (The Boeing...

In this chapter, we consider the specific aspects of military technologies, as well as those used by the intelligence services. After a brief history of military technology, we focus on the improvement of canons as evidence of progress in military technologies and artillery systems. While military technology often has to satisfy some of the most ex...

This chapter begins by explaining the process of patenting and the structure of patents, the oldest standardized format for capturing technological knowledge. We review some historical patents, examples of patent litigation, as well as recent trends in intellectual property (IP) management. While many inventors patent their technologies, some choos...

This chapter is about how technologies, after they have been implemented in a product or service, are adopted by users and how they diffuse into society. Generally, once technologies have reached at least TRL 8, they move to TRL 9. TRL stands for Technology Readiness Level and this is a commonly used scale between 1 and 9 to track technologies as t...

This chapter discusses the relationship between nature and technology. We argue that technology – as we have defined it – is not unique to humans but that examples of technology can be found in nature. Next, we review the concepts of bio-inspired design and biomimetics which are the application of biological principles to artificially created techn...

This chapter is about the interplay of technological innovation and industry structure. In Chap. 7, we discussed how technologies and the products that contain them are adopted and diffused into society. In this chapter, we build upon those concepts (such as the S-curve) with a focus on how technological innovation in industries and markets comes a...

In this chapter, we first discuss the changing demographics of our species, homo sapiens. While we have very young populations in many developing countries, we observe an increasing number of people aged 65+ in other countries. This brings up a number of challenges, including how seniors can achieve a long and healthy life, a goal which can potenti...

This chapter discusses the roots and meaning of the word “technology” and how technology can be defined, classified, and described in a rigorous way. We all think we know what technology is from personal experience, and yet it is a multifaceted concept that requires some reflection. We introduce Object Process Methodology (OPM) as a way to model te...

The prior chapter focused on technology sensitivity analysis from a primarily functional and parametric perspective, for example, “How much % improvement in variable x is needed until the figure of merit J at the mission or product level becomes feasible?”. This chapter now adds considerations of form, that is, physical components, software, and in...

This chapter is our fourth case study where we consider technological evolution in the life sciences. Specifically, we take a look at the discovery of DNA in the 1950s and its structure and ways to sequence these long molecular chains which contain the building block information for living organisms. Starting with chain termination methods in the 1...

Technology is not static. It evolves over time. A key question is how to “properly” measure and therefore quantify technological progress. Being able to do so is important in order to set realistic targets for improvements of known technologies and to establish some estimates as to what new technologies would have to be able to achieve, in order to...

This chapter is a first in-depth case study and it presents the creation and evolution of the automobile as an example of how technology progresses over time. We explore the roots of the automobile as a means of personal transportation in the late nineteenth century and the Ford Model T, which ushered in the age of mass production. We then survey t...

This chapter examines the role of competition as a driver of technological progress. We take a brief historical look at the arms race during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. We then discuss several real-world situations of technological competition in duopolies and provide a framework for quantifying this effect using ga...

In this chapter, we look at the connection between technology and finance. This is important since given a finite R&D investment ceiling, technologies have to be rank-ordered using the “value” they can deliver to their parent system. First, we take a macroeconomic perspective by considering what has been the impact of technical innovation on so-cal...

This chapter is primarily looking at the flow of technological information from the outside of an organization into the organization in order to enhance its knowledge and capabilities. We first analyze the historical and present sources that produce new and improved technologies. We then deep-dive into the role of individual inventors, universities...

Ultimately, technology progresses through individual steps which are the results of specific research and development (R&D) projects. In this chapter, we first describe what kinds of R&D projects exist, and how to plan and successfully execute them. We then consider how multiple projects together – as a set – constitute an R&D portfolio. Portfolios...

This chapter reviews the history of how humans became a species that creates and uses technology along with some important milestones. The key features of Homo sapiens include our brains, and our ability to use them to form abstractions through language, as well as the extraordinary dexterity of our hands as enablers of technological evolution. We...

In this case study, we discuss the creation and evolution of the Deep Space Network (DSN). The DSN is NASA’s network of antennas and systems used to communicate with our interplanetary probes. The system was created in 1963, initially to support lunar robotic, and later the human missions to the Moon under the Apollo program. Since then, dozens of...

This chapter describes the primary ways in which technological knowledge can and should be managed inside of organizations. This is in contrast to Chapter “Technology Scouting”, which looked at the question of how technological information flows into the organization from the outside. We first discuss ways in which technological information is capt...

This chapter begins by explaining what a technology roadmap is and why it is important in helping organizations plan for the future. We also discuss briefly the history of technology roadmapping (Kerr and Phaal, Technol Forecast Soc Chang 155:119967, 2020) as well as provide an example of a reference technology roadmap. This roadmap is designated a...

This chapter takes a functional view of how technologies can and should be evaluated in a systems context. The main point is that technologies don’t have value on their own. Only in the context of a “host” system or product can technologies be properly evaluated. The simplest way to do this is to generate a two-level decomposition with the product...

Requirements are essential to coordinate purpose-driven activities distributed over several stakeholders. Requirements control the complex dynamics of socio-technical systems consisting of stakeholders and engineering artefacts and are, therefore, crucial for the success of socio-technical projects. Requirements management is challenging, in partic...

The digital transformation era is upon us. Digital transformation gradually crawls up the value chain from services and manufacturing to product design and systems engineering. In this paper, we envision a cloud-based ecosystem of systems engineering, which is model-based by definition. The ecosystem model we propose is called 2MIDSTARs, which stan...

Earth Observation (EO) satellite constellations offer new applications enabled by innovative technologies extending their use cases. Additionally, leveraging small satellites allows for limited cost and development time, but imposes tight Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) constraints. Long revisit times make traditional EO satellites unsuited to observ...

The original version of this book has been revised since this book was inadvertently published with few errors.

The Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) is an instrument traveling to Mars onboard NASA's Perseverance rover. It will demonstrate, for the first time ever, in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) on the surface of another celestial body. MOXIE will utilize the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars to create oxygen as a demonstration of a planned larger mis...

Traditional Earth-observing satellite constellations must preselect orbits to match established mission objectives, inherently limiting the capability of the system to respond to dynamic events. A more flexible approach to constellation design which maneuvers satellites to new orbits throughout the mission lifetime can enable the tracking of mobile...

NASA is interested in characterizing and robotically exploring the lunar permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) in advance of Artemis crewed landings. The challenging terrain of these regions means a lander would only be able to access the rim of a PSR, limiting line-of-sight communication and sensing into the PSR. Autonomously deployed lunar tower in...

The reuse of proven designs is a common practice in complex engineering systems. The contextual differences between missions, however, mean that design reuse is rarely a “copy and paste” effort – some amount of rework and adaptation is required. In the space industry, many projects adopt unstructured, non-systematic processes for assessing potentia...

With the emerging democratization of space, Earth Observation (EO) imagery is becoming increasingly important to a variety of industries. However, it remains difficult and expensive to build constellations that achieve continuous and high-quality global coverage. Reconfiguring a satellite constellation into different orbital planes to change its ob...

On-orbit assembly missions typically involve humans-in-the-loop and use large custom- built robotic arms designed to service existing modules. The concept of on-orbit robotic assembly of modularized CubeSat components supports use-cases such as rapidly placing failed nodes within a constellation of satellites and monitoring damaged assets in Low E...