Jon D. Breen

Mr. Breen has over 25 years of experience in mission-operations systems administration, systems engineering, network engineering, and the day-to-day stewardship of project-critical infrastructure at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He performs this work on behalf of Alethium Corp., which holds a direct prime contract with JPL. He has been essential to the successful launch and on-orbit operations of multiple JPL satellite missions — including Jason-1, WISE / NEOWISE, SPHEREx, and others — providing the ground-system infrastructure that mission-operations teams depend on around the clock, from pre-launch integration through years of nominal flight operations.

Mr. Breen is responsible for the daily operation of all project-critical computers across the missions he supports — software, hardware, networking, troubleshooting, testing, and integration of subsystems — plus all updates and modifications driven by each Flight Project's evolving requirements. He works directly with mission planners, flight controllers, and software teams to keep operational baselines healthy, security postures current, and uptime aligned with launch-window and contact-pass schedules.

In support of the Jason-series ocean-altimetry missions, Mr. Breen designs, deploys, and maintains the secure inter-agency network interfaces between JPL and NOAA for Jason-2 and Jason-3 — including site-to-site IPsec VPN tunnels and dedicated network circuits — so that mission data products, telemetry, and command traffic flow reliably and securely between the partner agencies. This includes the routing, firewall, certificate, and DNS configurations needed for high-availability cross-agency operations.

His technical work spans modern Linux server administration (RHEL / Rocky / AlmaLinux, Ubuntu LTS), virtualization and containerization, secure network and firewall engineering, VPN tunnels and dedicated-circuit provisioning, configuration management and automation, web and application server deployment (Apache, NGINX, Tomcat), and database administration across PostgreSQL, MySQL / MariaDB, and Oracle. He also handles DNS and TLS certificate lifecycle management, public-key infrastructure, and the day-two operations of public-facing services for federal and commercial customers — built on lessons learned across decades of NASA flight-project support.