David A. Mindell is the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. He has twenty-five years of experience as an engineer in the field of undersea robotic exploration, as a veteran of more than thirty oceanographic expeditions, and more recently as an airplane pilot and engineer of autonomous aircraft. He is the award-winning author of Iron Coffin: War Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor and Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight.