Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Michigan Technological University
Dr. van Susante is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering – Engineering Mechanics
department at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, USA. He is an expert with 20+
years of experience in Lunar and Mars construction and In-Situ Resource Utilization and is the founder of
the Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab (Huskyworks) at MTU. He is PI or Co-I on
numerous NASA grants with a total of $4M+ related to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) including
mining water on the lunar poles, extracting oxygen from lunar regolith, mining water from hydrated
minerals and buried glaciers on Mars, construction, excavation and compaction for lunar construction as
well as PI for one of the inaugural NASA Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) awards to detect
and quantify lunar volatiles and geotechnical properties of regolith. He is also PI for the MTU student
team that won the ARTEMIS AWARD in the 2020 NASA BIG Idea challenge competition and the team
that won the grand prize for scenario 2 in the NASA Watts on the Moon Challenge and advises a student
team for the NASA Lunabotics Mining competition.