Elliot "Joe" Cutting (Sept 27, 1928- Jan 24, 2024) was an American engineer, educator, and space mission planner known for his significant contributions to early unmanned space missions and his work on the concept of gravity assist. Throughout his nearly 50-year career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Cutting was instrumental in the planning and design of missions exploring the solar system. Cutting received NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work on the development and implementation of the gravity assist concept.

Early life and education

Cutting was born an only child, Sept. 27 1928 in Swampscott, MA to Roger and Florence “Floppy” Cutting (nee Lufkin). He was nicknamed “Joe” by his parents. He attended Fesseden School and Phillips-Exeter Academy where he took an interest in and excelled in science, mathematics and swimming. He participated in the Williams College-Massachusetts Institute of Technology “combined plan”, earning a BA in Physics from Williams and a BS in Electrical Engineering from MIT in 1950. He was a member of several engineering honor societies. His undergraduate mentor at MIT was Harold Edgerton, notable for his work in ultra-highspeed photography. After college and before graduate school, looking for adventure, he worked a summer for a gold mining company in Fairbanks, Alaska. He exchanged letters with his girlfriend and future wife, Ann (nee Hunneman) who he had met through a mutual family friend. In his letters to her he often included gold flakes known as ‘flowers’. During mining operations it was not uncommon to uncover the partially clad bones of wooly mammoth in the disturbed permafrost. When not working he hiked with friends and avoided bears. Back from Alaska, Joe and Ann continued their courtship and were married in 1952. For a time they lived in Marblehead, MA in a small but comfortable house while Joe attended grad school at MIT. After graduating with an MS in electrical engineering in 1952, he stayed on as a Research and Teaching Assistant at the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory. He was subsequently offered and took a position with Trans-Sonics, Inc. in Bedford, MA, where he performed engineering work on projects for the Army and Navy. In 1955 as a Sergeant in the Massachusetts Army National Guard, he applied for active duty and was assigned to the Guidance and Control Laboratory at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama where he worked for two years under Werner von Braun’s Scientific and Professional (S&P) unit developing rocket guidance systems. One outcome of this work was a guidance solution for the Army’s Sergeant rocket modified as a booster for the Explorer 1 satellite (designed by Caltech and JPL). The unusual guidance solution arrived at was to spin the upper stage of the rocket and payload at 750 rpm while on the launch pad. This spinning provided a stabilizing “gyroscopic force in lieu of a more complicated system that would have required vanes, gimbals, or vernier motors." (https://youtube/4DP1JmOqOzQ?si=P5Yja_GZXQswZuik). The Explorer 1 satellite was notable not only as America’s first satellite, but also led to the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts that arise from the interaction of the solar wind with the earth’s magnetic field. It also marked the start of the cold war space race between the US and Soviet Union (the Soviets had earlier launched their first satellites, Sputnik 1 and 2). Following his discharge from the army in 1957, Joe and his wife Ann and their son, Roger (born in 1954), headed west to California in the family’s 1952 faded blue Dodge coupe where Joe had accepted a position as a senior research engineer with the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. Joe spent his first two years at JPL working with Maxwell Noton, a noted Cambridge mathematician. Noton with Joe and F. L. Barnes published an analysis of radio-commanded mid-course guidance for space missions which became the bible for effecting mid-course trajectory corrections of spacecraft.

Academic career Scientific Contributions

Cutting concentrated on mission and trajectory design for unmanned lunar and planetary missions. Joe found his home at JPL as a team member in the Systems Analysis and Mission Design sections, where he remained for the next nearly 50 years, contributing to the planning of a range of unmanned missions to explore the planets of the solar system. A sampling of these missions included Ranger (lunar impact), Surveyor (lunar lander), Mariner (Venus, Mars, Mercury flybys and mapping missions), Voyager, Viking (Mars), Magellan (Venus), Galileo (Jupiter), Pioneer (Jupiter and Saturn). The early unmanned lunar missions provided important trajectory data for later manned missions such as NASA’s Apollo program. During his tenure as supervisor of the Trajectory Group of Mission Analysis at JPL, Joe and colleague Fran Sturms received Exceptional Service awards from NASA for the further development and implementation of the ‘Gravity Assist’ concept proposed by Mike Minovitch and others (see “Gravity’s Overdrive” in Smithsonian Air and Space, Feb-March, 1994). ‘Gravity assist’ was born out of concerns with the limitations in the velocity and payload capability of launch rockets which was heavily dependent on fuel. ‘Gravity Assist’, is the means by which a spacecraft can use the energy of the gravitational pull of a planet to boost it's velocity and set its trajectory on its way to its next destination. The utilization of ‘Gravity Assist’ resulted in more cost effective and efficient missions and allowed for missions that would otherwise have been impractical due to fuel requirements. ‘Gravity Assist’ was first utilized in the early 1970’s in the Mariner 10 mission with multiple flybys of Mercury (proposed by Guiseppe Columbo) using Venus for ‘Gravity Assist’ (designed by Fran Sturms and Joe Cutting), followed by Pioneer 11 (flyby of Jupiter and Saturn designed by Bill Kirhoffer) and then by Voyager 1 and 2 in the “Grand Tour of the Planets” in which a series of gravity assists allowed for flybys of all of the outer planets of the solar system in sequence (Flandro, G.A. Astronautica Acta, vol. 12, No. 4, 1966). ‘Gravity Assist’ has been popularized in recent years as a plot device in sci-fi books and films (eg. see Star Trek and “The Martian”, Andy Weir, Crown, 2014). Mid-career, Joe returned to the classroom and earned an MS in Ocean Engineering at USC in anticipation of future projects (Joe also went on to earn his Engineers Degree in Aerospace Engineering- EAE in 1983). One of Joe’s favorite projects, simultaneously appealing to the engineer and sailor in him, was mission design team leader for Seasat (1978), a satellite for remotely assessing ocean conditions (eg. measuring sea-surface winds and temperatures, wave heights, atmospheric liquid water content, sea ice features and ocean topography). Although short-lived (105 days) due to catastrophic failure of its electrical system, the satellite provided ample data for analysis. Later, in 1992, Joe served as mission design team leader for Topex/Poseidon, a more advanced oceanographic satellite that was tasked to map ocean surface topography to an accuracy of 5cm and yielded an astonishing 13 years of data on ocean circulation and tides helping to validate models of ocean currents. (https://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/topex-poseidon/summary/). After his retirement in 1995, he continued contract work part-time at JPL until the age of 80 while wintering in CA and summering with his family in Sedgwick, ME. Over the years he participated in over 100 ‘Team X’ sessions in which 10-15 engineers met as a team to brainstorm and develop advanced missions. One of his favorites involved sending an unmanned lander to Europa (one of the moons of Jupiter) which would melt a hole into the ice on the surface and deploy a submarine that would explore its theorized subsurface ocean. Currently, the ‘Europa Clipper’ (sans submarine) mission is slated to launch in 2024 to map the surface of Europa and look for evidence of a subsurface ocean that could conceivably support life (https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/faq/).

Sailing life

Cutting was an avid swimmer, hiker, sailor and reader. In California on weekends he sailed with family to Catalina Island on Pequod, his 32 ft. Vanguard sloop. As a member of the Los Angeles Yacht Club he was very much at home on the sea, racing and cruising the waters off the coast of California, Maine and many other locations both domestic and international. Cutting raced and cruised the coast of Maine sailing on his sailboat, Nerissa (a 28 foot cape Dory sloop). With friends he chartered a variety of boats in Tonga, Maine, Caribbean, Tahiti, Mexico, Norway , Yugoslavia and more. He skippered in numerous yacht races and crewed in five Trans Pacific (TransPac) races to Hawaii usually signing on as navigator, a job for which he was eminently qualified. In 1986 he served as Commodore of the Los Angeles Yacht Club. Later as commodore of the TransPacific Yacht Club, he organized and oversaw the 1995 TransPac Race.

Family

Married to Ann Madeleine Hunneman 1952 for 70 years and had two children (son Roger Cutting (Janet Poore), and daughter, Ann Elliott Cutting (Tom Soulanille); four grandchildren: Madeleine Loran (Josh Loran), Jennie Cutting (Cassidy Macfarlane), Matthew Soulanille, Paul Soulanille, and one great-grandson, Parker Loran.