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jayIn 1987, I was finishing my robotics Ph.D. at Georgia Tech and patgreene had been admitted for that autumn to law school at Stanford, so I was looking for aerospace automation-related jobs in northern California. An interview with Lockheed led to nothing, in part because I expressed a lack of enthusiasm for getting a security clearance. An old NASA Ames phonebook was in the GT placement office, and I started cold-calling. Strangely, this tactic worked...
I found a newly-created division dealing with space-based computer sciences that was building a diagnostic and control system for the Space Station heating and cooling system, a large Carnot refrigerator using two-phase ammonia as its working fluid. After a few months as a contractor, my start date with NASA was December 7, 1987.
I'm not going to go into details today... if anyone reading this wants them, ask me out for a drink or for lunch and I'll happily comply. Some things that I did...
After the team leads quit, I took over their combined role and led the thermal expert project to a series of live demonstrations... which worked. Using model-based reasoning in real-time, written in Lisp, with full-scale live, dangerous (protective gear required) hardware. This was 7 years before the Remote Agent project. Which success led in turn to other diagnostic projects for spacecraft subsystems... a lot of flowers bloomed.
Next, I worked with SETI, while it was still a NASA project. I fought hard to get sensors installed in the racks and monitoring software (written in C, this time) accepted in operations. The payoff came when deployed at Arecibo, one of the racks overheated and began to catch fire, two weeks before the grand unveiling and initial survey campaign began on Columbus Day, 1992. My sensors and software squawked at 2am and the on-duty operator investigated and saved the trailer of equipment, and project.
Meanwhile, NASA sent me back to grad school at Stanford, in geophysics, finishing up another degree in 1992.
Then in 1992-93 I spent a year-plus around Washington, DC, working in the Space Station Engineering office and learning how the proverbial sausage was made. At least I picked up a pilot's license then.
Which led to running a project in air traffic control, jointly with the FAA... basically a large client-server, linking lots of legacy ATC systems and the airlines through a back-end database to improve airport situational awareness. Before then, ATC didn't know when an airline planned to push-back an airplane... it was like playing Tetris. And the airlines didn't know when their inbound aircraft were likely to arrive at the gate, prior to actual landing. This was built and running at Atlanta airport by 6/96... in time for the Summer Olympics rush, as promised. As it evolved, it now saves about four minutes of delay per departure at that airport, and other airports are getting versions. That saves Delta $40M/year in direct operating costs, alone. I shared in a Space Act Award (about $800 cash) and two US patents. (Actually, these will be recognized at an awards ceremony next Tuesday at NASA, coincidentally ;-).
Since then, I've mostly worked on smaller, space-oriented projects. I have been the godfather of a particular Mars-analog test site in the Canadian Arctic, keeping it going for five years and doing some impact crater geophysical studies (aeromagnetic mapping). And officially named a few geographical features when I was the first to explore them. I've put together automation and diagnostics for lightweight Mars-prototype drills... worked on science aids for astronauts and explorers... participated in a Shuttle flight experiment... and in 1997-98 persuaded the rocket-development folks based in Alabama that we needed a built-in diagnostic and automated recovery capability in future launch systems, leading to the present-day vehicle health management program. Which I still play in, but only in a minor role nowadays.
I put together a research program in Intelligent Systems in 1999-2000, built it from nothing into a $25M/year program, and then handed it off. In part because I dislike being controlled, and higher management wanted a puppet once the funds arrived...
At the moment, I'm still a co-investigator in three drilling automation projects, am chief scientist for the integrated vehicle health management R&D office, have another proposal out to test human-robotic science productivity in geological field exploration (probably back on Devon Island, again), am about to turn over the last remaining NASA equipment in Atlanta to the FAA there, and am building a proposal for a new research project in air traffic nation-wide information management.
And, having reached my 15 years today with the Agency, I will now accrue four hours of vacation time per week, up from three. And being already a high-step GS-15, I'm basically maxed-out in terms of future earnings potential -- have hit the Congressionally-mandated ceiling. But I do what I do for the love of it, because it is fun and will eventually make a discernable difference...
patgreene had been admitted for that autumn to law school at Stanford, so I was looking for aerospace automation-related jobs in northern California. An interview with Lockheed led to nothing, in part because I expressed a lack of enthusiasm for getting a security clearance. An old NASA Ames phonebook was in the GT placement office, and I started cold-calling. Strangely, this tactic worked... I found a newly-created division dealing with space-based computer sciences that was building a diagnostic and control system for the Space Station heating and cooling system, a large Carnot refrigerator using two-phase ammonia as its working fluid. After a few months as a contractor, my start date with NASA was December 7, 1987.
I'm not going to go into details today... if anyone reading this wants them, ask me out for a drink or for lunch and I'll happily comply. Some things that I did...
After the team leads quit, I took over their combined role and led the thermal expert project to a series of live demonstrations... which worked. Using model-based reasoning in real-time, written in Lisp, with full-scale live, dangerous (protective gear required) hardware. This was 7 years before the Remote Agent project. Which success led in turn to other diagnostic projects for spacecraft subsystems... a lot of flowers bloomed.
Next, I worked with SETI, while it was still a NASA project. I fought hard to get sensors installed in the racks and monitoring software (written in C, this time) accepted in operations. The payoff came when deployed at Arecibo, one of the racks overheated and began to catch fire, two weeks before the grand unveiling and initial survey campaign began on Columbus Day, 1992. My sensors and software squawked at 2am and the on-duty operator investigated and saved the trailer of equipment, and project.
Meanwhile, NASA sent me back to grad school at Stanford, in geophysics, finishing up another degree in 1992.
Then in 1992-93 I spent a year-plus around Washington, DC, working in the Space Station Engineering office and learning how the proverbial sausage was made. At least I picked up a pilot's license then.
Which led to running a project in air traffic control, jointly with the FAA... basically a large client-server, linking lots of legacy ATC systems and the airlines through a back-end database to improve airport situational awareness. Before then, ATC didn't know when an airline planned to push-back an airplane... it was like playing Tetris. And the airlines didn't know when their inbound aircraft were likely to arrive at the gate, prior to actual landing. This was built and running at Atlanta airport by 6/96... in time for the Summer Olympics rush, as promised. As it evolved, it now saves about four minutes of delay per departure at that airport, and other airports are getting versions. That saves Delta $40M/year in direct operating costs, alone. I shared in a Space Act Award (about $800 cash) and two US patents. (Actually, these will be recognized at an awards ceremony next Tuesday at NASA, coincidentally ;-).
Since then, I've mostly worked on smaller, space-oriented projects. I have been the godfather of a particular Mars-analog test site in the Canadian Arctic, keeping it going for five years and doing some impact crater geophysical studies (aeromagnetic mapping). And officially named a few geographical features when I was the first to explore them. I've put together automation and diagnostics for lightweight Mars-prototype drills... worked on science aids for astronauts and explorers... participated in a Shuttle flight experiment... and in 1997-98 persuaded the rocket-development folks based in Alabama that we needed a built-in diagnostic and automated recovery capability in future launch systems, leading to the present-day vehicle health management program. Which I still play in, but only in a minor role nowadays.
I put together a research program in Intelligent Systems in 1999-2000, built it from nothing into a $25M/year program, and then handed it off. In part because I dislike being controlled, and higher management wanted a puppet once the funds arrived...
At the moment, I'm still a co-investigator in three drilling automation projects, am chief scientist for the integrated vehicle health management R&D office, have another proposal out to test human-robotic science productivity in geological field exploration (probably back on Devon Island, again), am about to turn over the last remaining NASA equipment in Atlanta to the FAA there, and am building a proposal for a new research project in air traffic nation-wide information management.
And, having reached my 15 years today with the Agency, I will now accrue four hours of vacation time per week, up from three. And being already a high-step GS-15, I'm basically maxed-out in terms of future earnings potential -- have hit the Congressionally-mandated ceiling. But I do what I do for the love of it, because it is fun and will eventually make a discernable difference...
