A brilliant and uncompromising engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Olivieri specialized in figuring out the cost of future missions — even when, at times, some of the technologies that would be required hadn’t even been invented yet.
His strength was keeping his eye on the big picture of the space program: gaining knowledge and understanding. Jerry liked telling his colleagues, “Our job is not to make the incredible possible. Our job is to make the impossible credible.” He took those visions to Orbital Sciences Corp. when he left JPL, helping to focus another big picture: the privatization of space so the government doesn’t have all the fun. He died October 23 from leukemia after rejecting a bone marrow transplant. He was 37.
(This is True author Randy Cassingham delivered Jerry’s eulogy. The full text is here.)