Lars Blackmore

About me:

I am at Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), where I am responsible for Entry, Descent and Landing of the Starship rocket. Starship is designed to send over 100 tonnes of payload to Low Earth Orbit, and eventually to send large numbers of humans to the Moon and Mars. Full reusability will allow this to happen for a small fraction of the price of existing launch vehicles, enabling entirely new classes of mission to explore our universe. In 2024, we achieved the first experimental ocean landing of Starship after returning from orbit, and are planning for a first landing back at the launch site in 2026.

From 2011 to 2018 I was responsible for Entry, Descent and Landing of the Falcon 9 rocket. My team figured out which hardware and software changes were needed to turn the Falcon 9 booster stage from an expendable rocket into a reusable one. In December 2015, Falcon 9 completed the world's first landing and recovery of an orbital-class booster stage, and as of 2025 the rocket has landed more than 500 times.

Previously I was in the Guidance and Control Analysis Group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, part of the California Institute of Technology, where I developed control and estimation algorithms for NASA's future space missions. I 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.

In 2007 I finished my PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Model-based Embedded and Robotics Systems group, under the supervision of Brian C. Williams. My thesis was on control and estimation of stochastic systems, in particular chance-constrained optimal planning - that is, finding the best plans such that the probability of failure is below a given threshold.

Previous research has been in control and estimation for Formula One racing. My MEng thesis was with the McLaren team and Prof. Keith Glover, and in my first year at MIT I carried out a project with the Jaguar team (now Red Bull Racing).

You can reach me at lars [dot] blackmore [at] spacex [dot] com.

Selected Publications:

"Robust Execution for Stochastic Hybrid Systems." L. Blackmore. VDM Publishing, 2008. ISBN 978-3-639-09800-6.

"Space Launch in 50 Years: Abundance at Last?" Gwynne Shotwell and Lars Blackmore. National Academy of Engineering 'The Bridge: 50th Anniversary Issue', Volume 50, Number 5, pages 144-146 (2021).

"Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets." Lars Blackmore. National Academy of Engineering 'The Bridge on Frontiers of Engineering', Volume 4, Number 46, pages 15-20 (2016).

"People in Control: Lars Blackmore." IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Volume 36, Number 6, pages 24-26 (2016).

"Feasibility Studies on Guidance and Global Path Planning for Wind-Assisted Montgolfiere in Titan." Nanaz Fathpour, Lars Blackmore, Yoshiaki Kuwata, Chris Assad, Michael Wolf, Claire Newman, Alberto Elfes and Kim Reh. IEEE Systems Journal, Vol 8, Issue 4, pages 1112-1125 (2014).

"Probabilistic Planning for Continuous Dynamic Systems under Bounded Risk." Masahiro Ono, Brian C. Williams and Lars Blackmore. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research,Volume 46, pages 511-577 (2013).

" Lossless Convexification of Non-Convex Control Bound and Pointing Constraints of the Soft Landing Optimal Control Problem." B. Acikmese, J. M. Carson III, and L. Blackmore. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Volume 21, Issue 6 (2013).

"Lossless Convexification of Control Constraints for a Class of Nonlinear Optimal Control Problems." L. Blackmore, B. Acikmese and J. M. Carson III. Systems and Control Letters 61 (2012), pp. 863-870.

"Chance-Constrained Optimal Path Planning with Obstacles." L. Blackmore, M. Ono and B. C. Williams. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 27, Issue 6, 2011.

"Lossless Convexification of a Class of Optimal Control Problems with Non-Convex Control Constraints." B. Acikmese and L. Blackmore. Automatica Vol. 47, No. 2, Feb 2011, pages 341-347.

"A Probabilistic Particle Control Approximation of Chance Constrained Stochastic Predictive Control." L. Blackmore, M. Ono, A. Bektassov and B. C. Williams. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 2010.

"Minimum Landing Error Powered Descent Guidance for Mars Landing using Convex Optimization." L. Blackmore, B. Acikmese and D. P. Scharf. AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics, Vol. 33 No. 4, July-August 2010.

"Active Estimation for Jump Markov Linear Systems." L. Blackmore, S. Rajamanoharan and B. C. Williams. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Nov 2008, Volume 53, Issue 10, pages 2223-2236.