AIAA Honorary Fellow Casani Died in June 2025

John R. Casani, an engineer who served a central role in many of NASA’s deep space missions, died on 19 June. He was 92 years old.

Casani studied electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. After briefly working at an Air Force research lab, he was hired to work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1956. His initial focus was on the guidance system for the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency’s Jupiter-C and Sergeant missile programs.

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, Casani went on to become an engineer on some of the earliest spacecraft. One of his jobs as payload engineer on Pioneer 3 and 4, NASA’s first missions to the moon, was to carry each of the 20-inch-long (51-cm-long) probes in a suitcase from JPL to the launch site at Cape Canaveral, where he installed them in the rocket’s nose cone.

Casani then served as spacecraft systems engineer for the two Ranger missions to the moon, before joining the Mariner project in 1965. Four years later, he became Mariner project manager.

He then took on the role of project manager for NASA’s mission to the outer planets and beyond — Voyager. He led the mission from clean room to space, and NASA noted that he was the first to envision attaching a message representing humanity to any alien civilization that might encounter humanity’s first interstellar emissaries.

After Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977, JPL focused on the Galileo mission and Casani was the project manager for 11 years, leading the effort from inception to assembly. He had to navigate several congressional attempts to end the project.

In 1988, he became deputy assistant laboratory director for flight projects, before serving as project manager of the Cassini mission to Saturn from 1990 to 1991. Casani became JPL’s first chief engineer in 1994, temporarily retiring in 1999, and then served on several nationally prominent committees, including leading the investigation boards of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander failures, and also leading the James Webb Space Telescope Independent Comprehensive Review Panel.

In 2003, Casani returned to JPL to serve as project manager for NASA’s Project Prometheus. In 2005, he became manager of the Institutional Special Projects Office at JPL, a position he held until retiring again in 2012. Casani’s work over the years helped advance NASA spacecraft in areas including mechanical technology, system design and integration, software, and deep space communications.

Casani was recognized with many awards over his lifetime, including the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, the Management Improvement Award, and the Air and Space Museum Trophy for Lifetime Achievement.

He volunteered on the AIAA Management Technical Committee and the Institute Development Committee (1996–2000); he also served as Board of Directors Vice President of Standards (1997–2000). A Class of 2009 Honorary Fellow, Casani also was honored with the 1979 AIAA Space Systems Award, the 1991 AIAA von Kármán Lectureship in Astronautics, and the 2005 AIAA Goddard Astronautics Award.