“I want to be able to look at a rocket launch and say, ‘I touched a piece of this.’”

That’s how Richard Spolzino describes the thing he’s chasing. Not a title, not a specific mission, not even NASA itself, just the ability to point at something real and know his work made it possible. At NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Spolzino works within Moon Base’s mission architecture and systems interoperability effort, helping identify what NASA still doesn’t know about the Moon and Mars, and making sure that missing information gets found before it becomes a problem.

“ For me, it kept coming back to where can I have the most impact? Where can my work touch the most things? “

Spolzino didn’t set out to end up here.

He started college as a history major. He switched to a physics track at Santa Clara University, thinking he’d end up in astrophysics. A research stint at Lick Observatory studying interstellar dust polarization taught him two things: the work was fascinating and, “I don’t think the staying-up-all-night thing is for me,” he says.

After graduation, he started down the path of Officer Candidate School in the Navy, hoping to fly jets. It didn’t pan out, and that detour led him to a graduate program at the University of Houston, combining aerospace engineering and space architecture — not the habitat-design kind of architecture people usually picture, but the systems-level kind, where a lunar oxygen plant connects to the rovers that feed it, which connect to the processor, which connects to the user drawing down the resource. “I was always more attracted to how all the pieces work together than to any single piece,” he says.

Ask Spolzino if he dreamed of working at NASA, and the honest answer is no.

“I really admire people who’ve had that drive their whole life,” he says. “For me, it kept coming back to where can I have the most impact? Where can my work touch the most things?” A University of Houston program with strong ties to Johnson Space Center put NASA on his radar alongside other options in industry and government. What ultimately drew him in wasn’t the agency’s name, it was the scope of the problems and the direct line he saw to senior decision-makers shaping the return to the Moon.