About

Mike Moore

I am an aerospace and software engineer in Houston. I work on spacecraft guidance and control, and in my own time I build robots that have to stay upright. This site is where I write down how those are going.

Houston, Texas
B.S. Aerospace, UT Austin · M.S. Computer Eng., UHCL

mike.moore@so.engineering github linkedin twitter

Spacecraft guidance and control

Ten years in the space business at NASA Johnson Space Center. I serve as lead developer for the Commercial Crew Program ascent-abort Guidance, Navigation and Control modelling and simulation team, managing a team building high-fidelity simulations of Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon — six degree-of-freedom dynamics, GN&C flight software, sensors, effectors and environment models, real-time capable, written in C++ with a Python front end.

2018 JSC Software of the Year Award, for a C++ math model library with a generic solver architecture for spacecraft power, thermal and fluidic systems. Honourable mention, NASA agency-wide Software of the Year.
2018 Spaceflight Awareness Award, for abort guidance and control simulation development and performance assessment.
Spacecraft attitude and orbit control simulations for the Deep Space Gateway.

Embedded systems

Firmware for commercial products, R&D prototypes, and robots built for the fun of it: SpotX navigation firmware, the real-time balance controller for Bobble-Bot, a custom flight controller for a DIY quadcopter, and CAN bus drivers for Chupacabra motor controller firmware.

A hand fitting a circuit board into a 3D-printed robot chassis on a workbench — Most of the embedded work looks like this in the end: a board, a printed part, and finding out whether the two agree.

Now

A single-link inverted pendulum on a bench — a NEO 550 driven by an ODrive S1 in torque mode, a Raspberry Pi running a Rust control loop at 200 Hz, MuJoCo for simulation, and renders built from its CAD to watch recorded runs. It swung up and balanced for the first time on 1 September 2026.

The pendulum balancing at the edge of my desk, with the app's Show screen on the left monitor and live plots on the right — The rig on my desk, rendered from its CAD and posed from a recorded run. The left monitor shows the app I built to drive it.

The pendulum balancing at the edge of my desk at night, lit by the two monitors — The rig on my desk, rendered from its CAD and posed from a recorded run. The left monitor shows the app I built to drive it.

The app's Show screen: the arm under its hold-limit arc, live lean and current traces, and behaviour buttons — The Show screen, mid-Sway: the arm under its hold limit, the lean and the motor current live, and the behaviours I can ask for. The corner reads **SOURCE SIM**. The same app drives the simulator and the real rig, and telling those two apart is most of what I write about.

The app's Show screen in dark mode: the arm under its hold-limit arc, live lean and current traces, and behaviour buttons — The Show screen, mid-Sway: the arm under its hold limit, the lean and the motor current live, and the behaviours I can ask for. The corner reads **SOURCE SIM**. The same app drives the simulator and the real rig, and telling those two apart is most of what I write about.

Contact

Feel free to reach out if any of my work or blog posts interest you. I am happy to answer questions or talk with others who have similar interests.

mike.moore@so.engineering github linkedin twitter