In June 1961, a UCLA graduate student's summer job at JPL was to solve a narrower trajectory problem, but on his own time he worked out gravity assist, the technique that now lets spacecraft borrow speed from a planet without burning any fuel at all

In June 1961, a UCLA graduate student's summer job at JPL was to solve a narrower trajectory problem, but on his own time he worked out gravity assist, the technique that now lets spacecraft borrow speed from a planet without burning any fuel at all

In June 1961, a UCLA graduate student called Michael Minovitch took a summer job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His actual assignment was narrower than what he ended up doing with it: work out the trajectory of a free-fall spacecraft moving between two points under the Sun’s gravity alone. On his own time, not as part of that assignment, he kept pushing at a harder, unsolved problem sitting right next to it, and by August he had worked out so…