User:Jonmsmith

Jon Michael Smith is a retired NASA Senior Executive. Mr. Smith was heavily involved in initial Space Shuttle Program's marketing project. He sold flights on the Space Shuttle to countries and firms that required space launch services. In his mid career years he led the award winning Advanced Communications Satellite program and served as the Commercialization Manager for the Space Operations Management Office, that led to the commercialization of NASA's polar communications network. In his later career years he returned to the Space Shuttle program and participated in the closeout planning of the Shuttle program.

After the Columbia accident, Mr. Smith was asked to lead a small team of managers to study of the Management Root Cause of the Space Shuttle Columbia accident and re3commend corrective actions. This was a challenging assignment because there were no "Management" Root Cause (MRC) techniques to guide the study team. The team developed unique approaches to analyzing managements role in disasters and identifying compelling corrective actions.

Mr. Smith retired from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas in January 2007. Now, he is the proprietor of Jon M. Smith and Associates (JMSA), a consulting firm. He is a subject matter expert on flight guidance and control systems, systems engineering and program management and control.

Mr. Smith is also known for his developments in Mathematics. His most notable is the development of the T-integrator. The T-Integrator is an accurate numerical integrator that can be tuned to the problem it is being used to solve. The T-Integrator is a numerical integrator based on information theory, not approximation theory. It is known for containing classical approximation theory integrators as special cases of the more modern information theory integrators. He published his work in The AIAA Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control and presented this engineering applications in his book, published by John Wiley and Sons, entitled Mathematical Modeling and Digital Simulation for Engineers and Scientists. The T-Integrator is also published in the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. He continues to develop this numerical integration concept in his retirement years.