Shooting for the Moon: Christina Koch’s Historic Journey From Johns Hopkins APL to Space
Johns Hopkins APL has been named to the 2026 Vault 150 Best Internships List, including ranking #8 for Best Internships for Data Analytics, #9 for Best internships for Information Technology, and #11 for Best Tech & Engineering internships. The program gives students a chance to solve critical challenges and make an impact, while working alongside teams addressing some of the nation’s most complex technical challenges. Explore APL’s internship opportunities: https://www.jhuapl.edu/careers/internships
For the seventh year in a row, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, has been named to Fast Company’s list of the Best Workplaces for Innovators.
NASA’s Dragonfly mission has cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on track toward launch in July 2028.
On its record-breaking pass by the Sun late last year, the Johns Hopkins APL-built Parker Solar Probe captured stunning new images from within the Sun’s atmosphere. These newly released images — taken closer to the Sun than we’ve ever been before — are helping scientists better understand the Sun’s influence across the solar system, including events that can affect Earth.
Researchers have touted the revolutionary potential of quantum computers to take on otherwise intractable challenges, like modeling complex molecular behavior for drug discovery or factoring enormous numbers in use for cryptography schemes. But how such a computer would be created remains unclear. With help from Johns Hopkins APL, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is attempting to define, in practical terms, what a useful quantum computer looks like and how it must be built.
NASA’s Dragonfly, the first rotorcraft designed for scientific exploration on another ocean world, has passed its Critical Design Review. Led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the mission to Saturn’s icy moon Titan will investigate prebiotic chemical processes and complex organic compounds that, on Earth, are the building blocks of life.
Dave Van Wie has been selected to lead Johns Hopkins APL as its next director. Van Wie, currently the Air and Missile Defense Sector Head at APL, is a distinguished leader and scholar whose groundbreaking contributions to national defense and aerospace engineering have significantly advanced our nation’s security. His appointment is effective July 14.
Biomanufacturing — the use of microbial organisms to make materials and molecules — can help solve important security challenges facing the United States, including making supply chains more secure, strengthening the defense industrial base, and producing materials for warfighters wherever and whenever they need them. Equipped with this understanding, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, are combining their technical expertise, creativity and national security acumen to put biomanufacturing to work, developing tangible solutions to solve these national challenges.
Dating back to the Sputnik era, APL’s Satellite Communications Facility (SCF) has provided support for a broad range of spaceflight missions for more than six decades. Now the SCF team is providing communications support for Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 — a lunar lander mission that launched on Jan. 15.
