About

Olivier de Weck is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he serves as the Associate Department Head of Aero Astro. His research is in Systems Engineering with a focus on how complex technological systems are designed and how they evolve over time. He specializes in Systems Engineering, Technology Management, Astronautics and Space Logistics, and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization, with additional interests in Remote Sensing and Earth Observation. Olivier de Weck has contributed to the field through his role as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets and his authorship of the textbook 'Technology Roadmapping and Development,' which received a most promising textbook of 2024 award. He holds degrees from ETH Zurich and MIT, including a Ph.D. in Aerospace Systems, and is a Fellow of INCOSE and AIAA. His professional experience includes positions outside MIT such as Senior Vice President for Technology Planning and Roadmapping at Airbus, and he has been recognized with numerous awards and honors for his contributions to aerospace and systems engineering.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Business
• Medicine
• Aerospace engineering
• Geography
• Mathematics
• Social psychology
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Meteorology
• Psychology
• Marketing
• Environmental science
• Knowledge management
• Geology
• Telecommunications
• Process management
• Engineering management
• Remote sensing

Selected publications

• Design Optimization of Lifting Geometries for Aerocapture Maneuvers

  2026-01-08

  articleSenior author

  A recent study has shown that substantial orbit plane rotation can be achieved during aerocapture, allowing mission designers to access orbits not attainable with traditional propulsive interplanetary orbit insertion techniques. Achieving large plane changes requires vehicles with high lift to drag ratios (L/D), and a comprehensive assessment of such systems does not currently exist. In response, this work develops a multidisciplinary design and optimization framework that integrates geometry generation, aerothermodynamic analysis, thermal protection system (TPS) sizing, and weight estimation models to identify Pareto-optimal aeroshells with the best packaging statistics for a given L/D. Applied to Mars aerocapture, the analysis shows that higher-L/D designs trade reduced effective payload mass fraction for improved plane rotation capability. Biconic configurations provide the most favorable packaging characteristics at high L/D, followed by ellipsleds and sphere-cones, the latter of which achieve the highest overall effective payload mass fractions. Increasing entry speed reduces packaging efficiency across all geometries, and the TPS mass of ellipsled configurations grows particularly rapidly once heating levels exceed the qualified range of low-density ablators. Lower-mass TPS solutions are attainable by extending these ablators beyond this range, but operational uncertainty will increase and the resulting high recession rates may lead to significant shape change.

  PublisherDOI

• Quantifying Structural Complexity, Effort, and Performance: An Early Experiment Using Network Design Tasks

  Systems Engineering · 2025-12-29

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT Structural Complexity is perceived as driving cost in system development, yet managing it effectively requires empirical understanding. This study investigates human decision‐making using a toy transportation‐style network design task, focusing on how Structural Complexity, Effort, and Performance interact. Seventy‐four participants (primarily systems engineers) worked in small groups to design simple transportation‐style networks, drawing 188 designs across 20 node sets (each representing a distinct spatial configuration). This was a trial of a new type of experimental setup aiming to empirically test hypotheses in Systems Engineering, and though it is broadly promising, the design needs significant iteration for better controls. Such iteration could greatly help SE theory. Four hypotheses grounded in the proposed “Conservation of Complexity law” were explored, with early results showing that additional Effort was generally associated with modest improvements in Performance; Performance rises with Structural Complexity, but sees diminishing returns; additional Effort did not reliably reduce Structural Complexity at fixed Performance; and the Effort–Complexity relationship followed a sub‐linear trend. In parallel, we outline a practical, repeatable quantification method for structural complexity to support a more robust and comparable measurement in human‐in‐the‐loop experiments. Future experimental designs with standardized constraints, behavioral controls, and normalized performance metrics will be necessary to generalize these insights.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social structures relevant to longevity service systems

  2025-01-28

  book-chapterOpen access

  This study explores the intersection of longevity planning, service systems, and financial planning to enhance our understanding of longevity planning at the service system level and offer insights into building longevity service systems. This study adopts Vink and Koskela-Huotari’s iceberg framework for an extensive literature analysis, viewing social structures as materials for service design to shape the research question: What are critical design considerations for physical components (symbols, artifacts, activities, relationships) and institutional elements (regulative, normative, cultural-cognitive pillars) within social structures for developing comprehensive, meaningful longevity service systems? The aim is to formulate comprehensive design recommendations by integrating insights from diverse disciplines based on social structures. The study conducted an extensive preliminary literature review using the modified PRISMA checklist, focusing on the most cited 100 peer-reviewed articles from 2019 to 2024 within the USA. Keywords such as longevity planning, design for longevity, and systemic service were used. After an initial review of titles and abstracts, selected papers and gray literature underwent full-text analysis. Ultimately, 30 papers met the inclusion criteria for systematic review. Integrating the insights from the systematic review and iceberg framework, this study contributes by offering holistic considerations for the design and development of longevity service systems.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Doing More with Less: Co-Design of Human Moon and Mars Architectures with Their Funding Sources

  2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  article

  As the next Moon landing draws ever closer, the landscape of human space exploration is changing quickly. Over the last decade, sixteen countries have established new space agencies, and there are currently 52 signatories to the Artemis Accords. Private citizens can now travel to space and back using commercial services, with reusable boosters and spacecraft at the heart of the new capabilities. Reusability, mass production of space systems and the scaling-up of the space value chains are driving ongoing reductions in the cost of access to space and an exponential increase in capacity for crew and payload to orbit. Within this context, larger campaigns to the Moon and Mars are increasingly being studied, especially by commercial organizations and academia, motivated by their increased cost-effectiveness, robustness and potential to inspire. However, despite the multiple advantages of larger missions, the caps on taxpayer funding, a legacy of expensive cost-plus contracts, a general risk-aversion and a perception that larger missions would be even more unaffordable than smaller ones, all contribute to NASA still officially planning only for small Moon and Mars surface missions of 2–4 crew. This paper deconstructs and refutes the implicit assumption that larger missions are impossible to finance and demonstrates that NASA can do more with less: we show that larger human exploration missions would benefit from being co-designed alongside an international funding scheme well-aligned with stakeholder needs, such that the cost/benefit trade-off for each nation's taxpayers dominates that of a smaller mission. We do this by (1) modeling campaign architectures over a broad range of scales to quantify the economies of scale and scope arising from larger and longer-lasting campaigns and missions, and (2) by modeling the willingness and ability of Artemis Accords members to contribute an annual “subscription price”, in exchange for participation of their nationals in upcoming historic missions to the Moon and Mars. The latter model uses five parameters including GDP, population and sovereign credit ratings to estimate the likely deep space human exploration budgets of each Artemis Accords member nation. These model results were validated against recent human spaceflight history, with broad correspondence between the nationalities of ISS astronauts vs. model predictions. The methods were applied to two NASA-award-winning mission architecture case studies summarized here, the 36-crew Pale Red Dot mission to Mars, and the 154-crew MARTEMIS lunar campaign. The model was stress-tested with random lack of political will and with doubling of DDT&E and launch costs, finding that both PRD and MARTEMIS remain feasible within current NASA budgets and at subscription prices affordable to sufficient AA members. The Pale Red Dot case study results show that, at a 95% confidence level, a 4-crew mission to Mars with 2 NASA, 1 ESA and 1 JAXA astronauts would cost NASA between $1-$3B per year for 18 years, whereas a 36-crew mission with 8 NASA astronauts and the remaining 28 crew hailing from 20 Artemis Accords signatories would cost NASA between $0.9 - $2.4B per year over 27 years; analogous findings were made for the MARTEMIS campaign. This work contributes to motivating NASA and its Artemis Accords partners to collaborate in designing and co-funding larger, safer, more inspiring and more cost-effective human missions to the Moon and Mars.

  PublisherDOI

• Toward a conceptual framework for AI and robotics in aging in place: insights from constructivist grounded theory

  Proceedings of the Design Society · 2025-08-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  ABSTRACT: This descriptive study examines participant reactions to a new framework categorizing aging-in-place (AIP) services with AI and robotics through a think-aloud method. Using grounded theory, we examined older adults’ perceptions of AI’s role in promoting independence. The framework consists of four AI archetypes that address the cognitive and functional needs of the elderly with physical or digital interventions: Advisor AI, Burler Robot AI, Valet Robot AI, and Conductor AI. The authors conducted virtual interviews with four Boston-based retirees (mean age 70), revealing expectations and concerns regarding health monitoring, routine assistance, and social well-being. The findings emphasize inclusivity, adaptability, and practical relevance for aging populations and underscore the importance of trust, lifestyle integration, and adaptability in fostering meaningful AIP applications.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measures of operational utility in evolving space situational awareness sensor networks

  Acta Astronautica · 2025-10-30

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Road Ahead: Present and Future Trends in Global Civil Aircraft Regulations

  2025-04-07 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In the past century, the complexity of civil aircraft has grown exponentially to offer higher performance and enhanced operational capabilities, including improved reliability, maintainability, and other critical “-ilities.” While this increased complexity enables greater functionality, it often comes at the cost of prolonged development schedules and escalated budgets. Aircraft complexity is intrinsically tied to an evolving web of requirements, encompassing internal demands driven by market profitability and external mandates from regulatory bodies. To understand the dynamics shaping the complexity of civil aircraft, this paper examines the trends in airworthiness and environmental regulations in the three largest aviation markets: the United States, China, and Europe. Regulations were extracted and analyzed from governmental archives to track trends in the number and nature of aircraft requirements in the last two decades. Additional insights were derived from recommendations by the International Civil Aviation Organization and SAE International, as well as environmental objectives set by respective governments, to predict future regulatory trends. Since 2003, an increase in the number of regulations of 33% and 23% was recorded for the US Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Agency, respectively. More recently, airworthiness requirements displayed greater stability and international harmonization than environmental regulations, which were identified as key drivers of future regulatory reforms and global inconsistencies. To characterize how regulations impact both the aircraft as a system and through its subsystems, this study relies on a case study of the regulations impacting the design of landing gears, where system and functional requirements contributed to more than 80% of the relevant regulations. Through this multi-layered and international approach, this paper provides a comprehensive understanding of how evolving regulations shape the complexity of civil aircraft, offering insights that can guide future policy development and industry innovation.

  PublisherDOI

• Starship as an Enabling Option for a Uranus Flagship Mission

  2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In 2022, the National Academy of Sciences Planetary Science Decadal Survey recommended exploration of Uranus as its highest priority Flagship mission for the 2030s. The Decadal recommendation relied on the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) concept as its baseline for the mission. UOP assumed a launch in 2031 on a Falcon Heavy Expendable rocket and an intermediate Jupiter flyby, allowing it to arrive at Uranus before 2050. At present, it is likely that the original UOP launch will be postponed, which will cause a Jupiter gravity assist to become unavailable and could delay the arrival at Uranus. However, a later launch date allows us to consider launch vehicles currently under development such as SpaceX's Starship, a two-stage heavy-lift launch vehicle that is intended to be refuelable on-orbit. Although Starship's performance capabilities have yet to be demonstrated, current development timelines suggest they will be known before selecting a launch vehicle for a Uranus mission. This study investigates the possibility of leveraging the anticipated capabilities of Starship to support a Flagship mission to Uranus. The results show that with on-orbit refueling, Starship will be capable of performing direct transfer to Uranus without the need for intermediate planetary flybys. Direct transfer with Starship orbit insertion allows nearly five metric tonnes of mass to be deployed to Uranus orbit using nine refueling launches in ten years, compared to more than thirteen years for UOP. If the spacecraft is used to perform the orbit insertion maneuver, five tonnes of mass can be deployed in less than nine years with seven refueling trips. Larger payload masses and shorter times of flight can be achieved by using Starship to perform aerocapture. As a mid- to high-lift to drag ratio vehicle, Starship can succesfully perform aerocapture while maintaining deceleration and heating values that are not more severe than those observed by aerocapture studies for other vehicles. With seven refueling launches and a seven-year transfer time of flight, Starship can deliver nearly six tonnes of payload mass to Uranus using aerocapture. With a longer time of flight and additional refueling launches, mission masses greater than fifty tonnes can be delivered to Uranus orbit. By using Starship to deploy a spacecraft and probe of a similar design as UOP, the reduced transfer times can facilitate an arrival at Uranus well before equinox, and can enable science phases of up to ten years. Performing the insertion burn with Starship also increases the Δv available for the science tour. Using the UOP architecture would make the mission compatible with both Falcon Heavy and Starship, thereby reducing risk. Alternatively, the additional payload mass that can be deployed to Uranus with Starship can enhance the orbiter and probe architecture beyond the current design, potentially allowing for a larger instrument suite, additional probes, and even a secondary spacecraft. To this end, a Uranus Flagship mission using Starship presents a higher-risk, yet potentially greater-science-return option that could become viable if financial conditions permit.

  PublisherDOI

• Resilience and Performance of Nontraditional Space Situational Awareness Sensor Architectures

  Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets · 2025-04-01

  article

  There is increasing interest in the adoption of distributed, multidomain space situational awareness (SSA) sensor architectures as a means of improving both mission performance and resilience while decreasing total cost. One promising concept calls for augmenting legacy terrestrial architectures with opportunistic sensors hosted on government and commercial spacecraft. This research explores this concept by simulating the observability of resident space objects (RSOs) in medium Earth orbit (MEO) and geosynchronous orbit (GEO) by 3300 candidate sensor network architectures. Over a simulated [Formula: see text] period, a network composed of 4 terrestrial telescopes and 10 hosted payloads in low Earth orbit revisited each of over 1200 MEO and GEO RSOs in under [Formula: see text]. This network also proved to be highly resilient, maintaining this revisit rate in an environment in which all terrestrial telescopes were inoperable. In this maximally degraded environment, over 600 space-based sensor networks were still capable of revisiting each RSO in under [Formula: see text]. Results of this research suggest that space-based opportunistic hosted payloads stand to concurrently improve the performance and resilience of existing SSA sensor networks used for deep space object catalog maintenance.

  PublisherDOI

• Assessing Science Robustness in Uncertain Environments: Application to a Uranus Flagship Mission

  2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Defining science objectives for missions to unexplored bodies can be difficult when the underlying processes and mechanisms are not well understood. This uncertainty presents a challenge when attempting to determine mission requirements to address these objectives. Additionally, uncertainties in the environment may present risks to the system and mission operations. To this end, uncertainty quantification is increasingly used to inform and validate mission design. However, a framework has yet to be developed to support trajectory tradespace exploration of missions targeting uncertain environments through science modeling. The proposed methodology develops a science systems engineering framework integrating a science representation with trajectory designs to compute quantitative science value metrics. The science model is established by identifying relevant physical models (such as governing equations and assumptions) and input variables from the literature, simulation data, as well as past mission results. Variables are defined with probability distributions, and Monte Carlo simulations are used to quantify the uncertainties. For a given trajectory, the analysis outputs predictive probability distributions of the science value metrics, highlighting the trajectory's science performance and its robustness to uncertainty in the physical processes. The framework is applicable to any mission targeting highly dynamic and uncertain processes. This paper demonstrates its application to a future Uranus Flagship mission, focusing on magnetosphere science objectives. Listed as the highest priority Flagship mission by the latest Decadal Survey, a mission to the Uranian system aims to answer science questions regarding Uranus's interior and atmosphere, its satellites and rings, and its magnetosphere. Analytic and numerical models have been developed to understand Uranus' magnetosphere; however, significant uncertainties remain, leading to challenges when defining magnetosphere science investigations. By applying the proposed methodology, this paper shows a significant variation in predicted science metrics of interest (e.g., number of magnetopause crossings) that can be expected from similar trajectories due to varying environment conditions (solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field) or different arrival times at Uranus. These results should inform the flow-down of measurement requirements to mission design requirements for magnetosphere science.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Afreen Siddiqi

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  106 shared

• Paul T. Grogan

  50 shared

• K. P. Sinha

  Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning

  47 shared

• Jeffrey A. Hoffman

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  42 shared

• Eun Suk Suh

  Seoul National University

  42 shared

• Chaiwoo Lee

  IIT@MIT

  32 shared

• Il Yong Kim

  Queen's University

  30 shared

• Edward F. Crawley

  American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

  30 shared

Labs

• Human-System CollaborationPI

Education

• Ph.D., Aeronautics and Astronautics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1990

• M.S., Aeronautics and Astronautics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1986

• B.S., Aeronautical Engineering

  University of California, San Diego

  1984

Awards & honors

• Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (…
• Best Path to Flight Award, NASA Big Idea Challenge, 2021
• Best Paper of the Year Award, Systems Engineering Journal, 2…
• Distinguished Service Award, International Council on System…
• Teaching with Digital Technology Award, MIT, 2017