Dr Lars Blackmore

Lars is currently the Senior Principal Mars Landing Engineer at SpaceX, where he leads the development of landing SpaceX’s new Starship rocket. Before that, Lars led the SpaceX team that landed the Falcon 9 booster rocket, which became the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket and has landed successfully more than 500 times.

While landing Falcon 9’s booster cut launch costs dramatically by enabling partial reusability of a rocket, landing both the upper and booster stages of Starship would enable full reusability. This will further lower the cost of access to space, and make Starship the first ever fully reusable rocket. In 2024, Lars’ team 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.

Before his time at SpaceX, Lars was at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed technology for precision landing on Mars and algorithms for the SMAP climate change satellite, which is currently in orbit.

Lars studied Engineering at Cambridge and worked with the McLaren Formula One racing team during his Master’s studies, before receiving a Kennedy Scholarship to pursue a PhD in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at MIT. He is the recipient of AIAA Newbold Award, the National Academy of Engineering’s Gilbreth Lectureship, the MIT ’35 under 35’ award and the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award. Lars appeared in Netflix’s ‘Return to Space’ documentary, National Geographic’s ‘Mars’ series, and the Science Channel’s ‘Man vs the Universe’ series.