Mike Menzel

Mike Menzel is the NASA Mission Systems Engineer for the JWST at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Menzel has held this position since he joined NASA in June of 2004. His involvement with the James Webb Project extends back to 1998 when he became the Chief Systems Engineer for Lockheed Martin’s Pre-Phase A studies for the then Next Generation Space Telescope and later for Lockheed’s Phase A JWST contract. In 2001, he joined the Northrop Grumman JWST systems engineering team. In his role on JWST, Menzel oversees all system engineering efforts which include requirements formulation and management, systems design and integration, and systems validation and verification. He has led numerous studies which have contributed to the systems design and verification program. He wrote one of the first articles to layout a verification program for the system, “A Strawman Verification Program for the Next Generation Space Telescope” in 1998 and led the Independent Verification Assessment Team, to evaluate the verification risks in 2003. Prior to his involvement with James Webb, Menzel was the Deputy Program Manager for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Missions Group for Lockheed Martin. While in this position, he participated in system engineering activities for the HST Orbital System Test (HOST), which flew on STS 95. Between 1995 and 1997, he was the Director of Systems Engineering at Orbital Science Corporation (OSC) in Germantown, Maryland. Aside from…