NASA
L'SPACE MCA — Team 19: Ad Astra
2026
Lead Systems Engineer on an 18-member MCA team designing an autonomous lunar PSR volatile-prospecting rover at Nobile Rim 2.
Computer Science · USC ViterbiLos Angeles, CA
Joshua Terranova
Research-focused engineer at the intersection of spacecraft systems, autonomous robotics, and agentic AI.
About
I am a USC computer science student investigating lunar volatile characterization, vacuum-materials behavior, AI-driven autonomous exploration, and agentic systems. I serve as Lead Systems Engineer on NASA L'SPACE MCA and NPWEE teams.
- Education
- USC Viterbi School of Engineering
- Computer Science · strong academic record
- Focus
- AI/ML, scientific computing, full-stack web, aerospace-adjacent tooling, and shipping production-quality software.
Highlights
NASA L'SPACE systems engineering, USC research labs, and independent research projects—from the curriculum vitae.
NASA
L'SPACE NPWEE — Team 10: Forged in Orbit
2025
Lead Systems Engineer on a 12-member NPWEE team—every engineer answered to me—authoring a $10,000-class cold-welding proposal and lead-authoring L-MAP-FI.
Personal project
SpaAIder — Agentic Runtime
2025–Present
Local-first multi-agent runtime with persistent cross-session memory, heterogeneous clients, and Ollama-first sovereign inference.
Personal project
Pneumonia Detection from Chest X-Rays
2025–2026
TensorFlow pipeline with EfficientNetV2B0 transfer learning—83% validation accuracy on 368 held-out radiographs.
Personal project
LLM-V1.0 — Small-Scale Language Model
2025–2026
Designed and trained a ~30M-parameter GPT-style transformer (8 layers, 8 heads, 512-dim embeddings, 8,192-token BPE vocab).
Skills
Tools and domains I use most often—always learning and refining.
Languages
- Python
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Swift
- C++
- Java
- SQL
AI & ML
- PyTorch
- TensorFlow
- LLMs
- Computer vision
- NLP
- Research pipelines
Web & systems
- Next.js
- React
- Node.js
- APIs
- Tailwind CSS
- Databases
Aerospace & design
- Mission planning
- Scientific computing
- Fusion 360
- AutoCAD
Contact
Open to research collaborations, internships, and interesting technical problems. Reach out by email or connect on LinkedIn and GitHub.