Jon MacArthur is the inaugural Michael Micci Early Career Professor in Aerospace Engineering. Credit: Danielle Blake / Penn State.
Q&A with the Inaugural Michael Micci Early Career Professor in Aerospace Engineering
Jon MacArthur will join Penn State’s Department of Aerospace engineering in August as an expert in space propulsion
Aug 11, 2026
By Tucker Leighty-Phillips
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Jon MacArthur, the incoming inaugural Michael Micci Early Career Professor in Aerospace Engineering, has had a long, winding journey to Penn State. Since finishing his undergraduate degree at Iowa State, he has spent time working for NASA, completed a master’s and doctoral degree at MIT, participated in the U.S. National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program to learn the full process of expanding a research idea into a fully developed business, was an electric space propulsion engineer for Lockheed Martin and, most recently, was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University. Now, he said, he is excited to “lay down an anchor” in the Penn State Department of Aerospace Engineering.
In this Q&A, MacArthur discussed his research, his initial inspiration for becoming an aerospace engineer and what he hopes to bring to Penn State both in the aerospace department and in collaboration with other on-campus facilities.
Q: How does it feel to be joining the Penn State College of Engineering?
MacArthur: It's kind of full circle. My dad grew up in Carlisle, went to Juniata College and became a chemist, and then moved to Nebraska, where I was born and raised. There’s this weird temporal loop where suddenly I'm going right back in his stomping grounds.
I've been very impressed by College of Engineering, and especially the aerospace engineering department. Having a standalone aerospace engineering department is a commodity for a big R1 school. Penn State faculty do a great job on both the aeronautics side and the astronautics side, and I'm excited to join them and continue building the propulsion element of the astronautics side.
Q: What are your primary research interests?
MacArthur: I work on spacecraft propulsion systems. Think of it like this: In your car, there is either an engine or battery and a motor that you rely on as your propulsion system to take you between point A and point B. It’s the same with airplanes and rockets. It takes a whole bunch of oomph to get a rocket up to orbit. But once you're on orbit, you still need to maneuver and maintain your orbit, propel your spacecraft to a new orbit, or leave Earth entirely for deep space. That requires a propulsion system, just like a car or an airplane. The work I do primarily focuses on advancing electric propulsion systems for spacecraft.
It’s pushing the boundaries on propellant efficiency, thrust density, and power. All are performance metrics that are analogous to the miles per gallon or horsepower in your car. But just like with internal combustion engines in traditional cars, there's only so much combustion energy that you can retrieve from fuel and oxidizer. That’s why electric propulsion really shines for in-space use cases, whereby electrical energy is used accelerate a propellant for thrust in the opposite direction, removing that combustion energy barrier, so we can go further faster more efficiently.
Q: What initially inspired you to pursue aerospace engineering?
MacArthur: I'm a big proponent of left brain and right brain education, personally speaking. My mom was a piano teacher, and I grew up singing and playing instruments. My dad was a chemist, so I had both the analytical and artistic personas present in my upbringing. My dad was more of the sci-fi nerd. He got me watching old Shatner-era Star Trek, and then Picard-era Star Trek, and more Star Trek beyond that. That was my initial foray into the space realm.
I got into model rocketry around 10, 11 years old through a 4-H model rocketry summer program. What appealed to me was the combination of sci-fi intrigue mixed with the creativity of doing research that seeks to solve new problems, as well as the excitement of pushing humanity's footprint in and beyond the solar system. The propulsion side of research and aerospace engineering has a more direct A to B correlation:if we make propulsion systems better for spacecrafts directly, then we can go further, go there faster, send more stuff and more people out further beyond Earth. Of course I want to build a warp drive. But, barring that, what's the next best thing? I think it's advancing electric space propulsion capabilities.
Q: As the inaugural Michael Micci Early Career Professor, how does it feel to carry his name and legacy in your own work?
MacArthur: It really does add an extra level of familiar support to the equation. It is daunting to move and start a new job in a new location. I was already familiar with Dr. Micci’s work in space and rocket propulsion. He came out of Princeton, where I’m coming from, and the world of space propulsion —especially in the academic research sphere — is a close-knit one, so I was familiar with the work being done at Penn State. He set a bar with work and that is exciting for me because it keeps me focused on maintaining that high bar and trying to push it further. He was clearly a valued member of the community and department, so it’s an honor to have his name in my title starting out at Penn State.
Not to mention, the support from Dr. Micci’s friends, family and colleagues has been phenomenal. It was a strong selling point for Penn State.
Q: What kind of research will you be doing within the department?
MacArthur: Dr. Micci and the researchers who came before me have done some impressive space propulsion work here, and I'm looking to build on that. My specific research focus is going to be on low-power (hundreds of watts or less) and high-power (tens of kilowatts and higher) spacecraft propulsion. Something Penn State has that not a lot of universities have is a fantastic material science program and nanofab facility, where we can do a lot of research on extremely small, really low-power thrusters that are great for small spacecraft that are much more affordable for researchers and small companies to utilize in space.
Then on the flip side, Penn State has a nuclear engineering program, as well as the Breazeale Nuclear Reactor. There is a lot of possibility for partnership there investigating the near future implications of nuclear-powered electric propulsion for large spacecraft and human-missions to deep space.
My goal is to continue broadening the envelope space power and propulsion and use all the world class facilities at Penn State in the pursuit of that goal.
Q: What is a space fact or piece of information that you find most exciting?
MacArthur: There’s currently all this buzz around AI data centers in space and nuclear-powered spacecraft, and it’s being sold as this brand new concept. People want to take nuclear fission reactors to power spacecraft, attach electric plasma thrusters and bring this Star Trek-era spacecraft to life at last. But in 1965, before we’d had anyone walking on the moon, the United States created a small nuclear reactor to power a spacecraft called SNAP-10A and put it into orbit. And even cooler (in my biased opinion) is that they used that nuclear fission reactor to power a cesium ion thruster in the first orbital demonstration of not just electric propulsion, but nuclear electric propulsion, over 60 years ago! Shoulders of giants.
I think one of the cooler parts of spaceflight is looking back on the golden era of the 1960s and seeing the experiments they were trying on any given Wednesday, and witnessing our cyclical rediscovery of these ideas today.
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