For Ball Aerospace, John has provided systems engineering solutions on the GHRS, COSTAR, and NICMOS Hubble Space Telescope instruments, including a role as the Mission Manager for the corrective optics instrument that repaired Hubble in 1994.John served as avionics lead and later Program Manager for the Ball built cryogenic instruments on the Spitzer Space Telescope deep space mission,for which he received NASA’s Exceptional Public Service Medal from JPL.

More recently, John managed the development and launch of the Kepler mission to find the prevalence of Earth sized planets in the habitable zone of stars in our galaxy, and remains the Program Manager on Kepler during its on-going flight operations phase. NASA awarded John a second NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal for his leadership on Kepler.