MULTI-ATTRIBUTE TRADESPACE EXPLORATION WITH CONCURRENT DESIGN AS A VALUE-CENTRIC FRAMEWORK FOR SPACE SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Born in southern Connecticut in 1977, Adam Ross moved to Florida for high school where he came to over-appreciate the hot weather and constant flux of tourists. Anxious to return to the Northeast, and interested in learning about anything and everything, he headed to Harvard University in 1996 for an undergraduate liberal arts education. Since the quest for truth underscored much of his introspective musings, he decided to pursue an education in Physics and Astronomy and Astrophysics in an attempt to understand the workings of the very small to the very large. He also took enough courses in Economics to earn a minor, if only Harvard offered such a thing. While at Harvard he started a student organization, the Society for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS), in an effort to educate and promote discourse in the larger Harvard community. Space was not just an object of scientific inquiry, but a place to be explored by all humankind.

While lobbying Congress with SEDS, he came to realize that many of the barriers to an expanding human presence in space stemmed from political, not technical, factors. Armed with this knowledge, and the realization that he probably wouldn’t become a world-renowned physicist, he decided to head off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 for graduate school, enrolling in both the Aeronautics and Astronautics department and the Technology and Policy Program (TPP). He knew little to nothing about engineering and figured
that MIT would give him a good idea about how space systems were conceived and created. Additionally, the TPP education would help him better understand the non-technical barriers to space exploration.