Living with hemophilia: How battling the rare bleeding disorder helped shape a local NASA engineer and last updated 2021-03-17 10:34:04-04 SUFFOLK, Va. - In February, Don Smith was glued to his computer screen, anxiously waiting to find out if NASA's Perseverance rover landed safely on the surface of Mars. He'd been involved in wind tunnel testing the rover's parachute system at Langley Research Center. "You do go through that seven minutes of terror," Smith said of the Entry, Descent and Landing portion of the mission. But being uncomfortable for a few minutes is nothing compared to what the aerospace engineer has lived with his entire life.