Experience Matters

Steven Hughes is the founder of Gen Astro and the architect of Epicycle, a unified, Julia native platform for trajectory design, simulation, optimal control, and navigation.

For twenty years, Steven was chief engineer and project manager of the General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT), NASA’s open source system for mission design and navigation. As principal investigator, project manager, and chief engineer, he defined its capability roadmap, specified many of its core astrodynamics algorithms, and led the engineering team that built it, shipping a publicly released system with roughly 50,000 downloads a year across government, industry, and academia. Epicycle is what he would build today, with everything that work taught him and none of the original constraints.

His trajectory design and navigation experience spans the full range of mission regimes, including low Earth orbit, GEO (Solar Dynamics Observatory), cislunar and lunar space (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), libration points (Advanced Composition Explorer), and interplanetary and small body destinations. He led formation flying trajectory design for the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, supported navigation for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), supported trajectory design for LCROSS, developed optimal orbit designs for LISA, and supported lunar landing architectures for NASA's CLPS program, all part of a career supporting mission design and flight dynamics from early concept through flight operations.

Steven holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Khashayar “Khashy” Parsay has over 15 years of experience in flight dynamics, with expertise in mission design, trajectory optimization, maneuver planning, formation flying, and flight operations. His experience across numerous NASA missions and advanced mission concepts spans virtually every major orbital regime, including Earth orbit, multi spacecraft formations, lunar and cislunar trajectories, libration point missions, small body exploration, and interplanetary trajectory design.

He has extensive experience developing flight dynamics software and operational ground system capabilities, including development for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, Space Weather Follow On L1 (SWFO L1), and Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) missions. His work has included the design, development, integration, testing, and operational deployment of flight dynamics software for maneuver planning, proximity operations, formation reconfiguration, trajectory optimization, Monte Carlo analysis, and other mission critical applications. He has also performed lunar mission design and analysis for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Khashy holds a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder and an M.S. in Applied Physics from Johns Hopkins University.