John R. Casani

John Richard Casani (September 17, 1932 – June 19, 2025) was an American engineer. He worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on NASA projects, where he managed the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini and Prometheus projects.

Casani was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 for pioneering systems engineering of planetary spacecraft and for leadership of spacecraft engineering and science teams.

Early life John R. Casani was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 17, 1932, to Jack and Julia Casani. After a hiatus, the Ghoul returned on Mariner 7, and Casani received drawing and paintings of the Ghoul. Casani also got the idea of an artifact attached to the spacecraft, "a message representing humanity to any alien civilization that might encounter humanity’s first interstellar emissaries." He asked astronomer Carl Sagan to think about it, and the idea evolved into the Voyager Golden Record. Casani served as project manager for the Voyager program from 1975 to 1977, and after its successful launches was promptly reassigned to the Galileo, for which he worked from 1977 to 1988. It remained in orbit around Jupiter until 2003. He became the Deputy Assistant Laboratory Director for Flight Projects in 1988, and Assistant Laboratory Director for Flight Projects in 1989. In 1994, he became Project Manager of the Cassini project.

Casani was described as a "good-natured" man, but was an autocratic project manager, nicknamed "Ayatollah Casani" by his colleagues.

Casani retired in 1999, but the retirement was a brief one; he was recalled two weeks later to work with the Johnson Space Center on a problem that could have caused the loss of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. He then headed up an internal JPL investigation of the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 probes, launched under cost-reduced "faster, better, cheaper" period, and was project manager for Project Prometheus until its termination in 2005. Casani retired from JPL in 2012. His papers are held by the Jet Propulsion Library and Archives. He received the Management Improvement Award for the Mariner Venus Mercury mission in 1974, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Space Systems Award in 1979, and the National Aerospace Club's Astronautics Engineer Award in 1981 for the Galileo project. He was also awarded the von Karman Lectureship in 1990, the American Astronautical Society Space Flight Award in 1989 and William Randolph Lovelace II Award in 2005, He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000,

Selected publications