Richard Spolzino's job title sounds abstract — mission architecture and systems interoperability — but his actual output is concrete and consequential. He maintains a growing registry of "data gaps": formally documented unknowns about the Moon that NASA and its partners must resolve before hardware decisions can be made. His team published roughly 25 last year and is on track for 60 by end of 2025. Each gap specifies what's missing, why it matters, what partial data exists, and a measurable target that industry or international partners can aim for. The concept already shapes real missions. When Voyager (formerly Astrobotic) was preparing its Griffin-1 lunar lander, Spolzino's team didn't redesign the instrument suite — that was locked. Instead they helped prioritize which data gets transmitted first through a bandwidth-constrained communication pipeline. On the procurement side, proposed instruments (spectrometers, sample collectors, tech demos) are now evaluated against the published gap list. Proposals that don't map to a documented need get filtered out before they advance. NASA leadership now requires companies pitching new instruments to show explicit alignment with a data gap before the conversation continues. This is a procurement filter masquerading as a knowledge-management tool, and that's what makes it interesting. By formalizing what NASA doesn't know, Spolzino's team has created a coordination mechanism that lets dozens of commercial and international partners self-select into useful work without NASA having to micromanage each payload. The data gap list functions as a public API for lunar science priorities — anyone can read it and build toward it. Spolzino's path to this role was nonlinear. He started as a history major at Santa Clara University, pivoted to physics, did research at Lick Observatory on interstellar dust polarization, briefly pursued Navy Officer Candidate School to fly jets, then landed in a graduate program at the University of Houston combining aerospace engineering and space architecture. The Houston program's ties to Johnson Space Center put NASA on his radar. What drew him wasn't the brand but the scope of unsolved problems and direct access to senior decision-makers. Three years in, Spolzino says the job corrected an assumption he carried from graduate school — that NASA had everything figured out. "Keeping the kind of reputation NASA has takes constant, deliberate work," he says. The agency runs on people solving problems in real time, which means early-career engineers can contribute meaningfully rather than executing someone else's playbook. His advice to students is practical: grades matter less than projects. Join clubs, build things, show up with results. The data gap framework sits within the Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at NASA's Langley Research Center. Its significance isn't in any single gap identified but in the institutional pattern it establishes: a formal, transparent mechanism for converting unknown unknowns into tractable, assignable problems. If it scales as intended — from 25 to 60 this year, presumably more after — it becomes the connective tissue between NASA's Artemis ambitions and the commercial ecosystem that must deliver on them. The underlying bet is that NASA's return to the Moon will succeed or fail not on any single rocket or lander but on whether the agency can coordinate a sprawling network of partners around shared priorities. Spolzino's spreadsheet of ignorance may be the most quietly important artifact in that effort.
