Kareem Badaruddin is the mission manager for NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
A veteran of more than 30 years at JPL, Kareem has worked in spacecraft engineering and technical leadership, including supervising chief engineers responsible for solving complex problems across NASA flight projects.
He joined the Voyager team around 2022, volunteering for the assignment when project manager Suzanne Dodd recognized that the aging spacecraft would require increasingly difficult engineering interventions.
Today, Kareem helps lead the effort to keep Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 operating nearly 50 years after their launch. His team manages declining electrical power, aging electronics, deteriorating propulsion systems, and communications across billions of miles.
He helped oversee the engineering response to Voyager 1’s 2023 communications failure, which required engineers to diagnose and work around damaged computer memory.
In a 2026 New York Times interview, Kareem described the unconventional risks the team must now take to extend the spacecraft’s lives: “We’re like pirates.”
His work is a remarkable example of engineering ingenuity applied to machines that have traveled farther than anything humanity has ever built.
