David A. Mindell

Current research (in no particular order)

  1. Putting the finishing touches on a book, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight to be published by MIT Press in Spring, 2008. This is the third in an (unplanned) trilogy spanning the past 15 years of research. See the books page for more info. See the new Digital Apollo Webiste

  2. Building a group at MIT in "Space Policy and Society," composed of engineers, historians, social scientists, former astronauts, and policy analysts. We are beginning to develop a colloquium series and a conference for Spring 2008 that will help set an agenda for research.

  3. Ten years ago my MIT students and I founded a research group called DeepArch, which laid the intellectual foundations for doing archeology in very deep water.Continuing a long-standing interest in technology, archeology, and the deep sea, Dr. Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole Oceanographic institution and I are collaborating on a long-term series of exploratoins of the seafloor of the Aegean in Greece. Brendan has an excellent website on the project at Woods Hole, and I have an older site with lots of links and publications.

  4. Continuing to develop a high-precision navigation sonar I built at MIT, which is being developed and marketed by Marine Sonic Technology (Gloucester, Virginia). Using spread-spectrum signal processing, this sonar makes the highest precision range and navigation measurements possible under the ocean, which is useful for a wide variety of precision survey and measurement applications.

  5. Serving as part of the editorial board for Harvard University Press's New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.

  6. Tinkering around with electronics for a new navigation system....