Institute of Navigation

Okay, alright. Alright, now, okay, so MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] now, how did you choose MIT? Was it easy--well, if you can get in, you should choose it (laughter).$$Well, okay, you know, four years later after coming out of high school, I was a much smarter person, much wiser about the world. And I realized that, and I'm a very competitive person, so once I realized--I went to U. C. Berkeley [University of California, Berkeley] and I was able to do well. I realized that I wanted the biggest challenge. I wanted to take on the toughest challenge and I wanted to be at the best school this nation had to offer, and I felt that was MIT. And I wanted to also experience the East Coast, and so I applied to MIT, Stanford [University, Palo Alto, California], U.C. Berkeley, University of Washington [Seattle, Washington] and Cal Tech [California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California]. The only school I didn't get into, and I won't hold it against them, was Cal Tech, and it really made me mad at the time, I mean, to be honest with you. And I still hold that letter today, right. And it's used, I've used that letter as ammunition for my entire life, to be honest with you. Even though this is on this tape, I'm just telling it like it is (laughter). You know, because I said I got into every school and I didn't get into Cal Tech, you gotta be kidding me, at that time, you know, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-one years old. So, I went to MIT, and being the competitive person that I am, I wanted to go to the best college, and I felt MIT was that school. And it actually turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. And because I went to MIT, got admitted, obviously started my graduate program, met some fantastic people--I mean people who just are my colleagues and best friends today--I met a fantastic advisor who took me underneath his wing. His name was Andy von Flotow. He was--$$Can you spell that?$$Yeah. Andy, A-N-D-Y, von Flotow, V-O-W [space] F-L-O-T-O-W. And he was, Andy was a person who grew up in Canada and got his Ph.D. from Stanford [University] and ended up on the faculty at MIT in the aeronautics and astronomics department. Even though I was a student in mechanical engineering, Dr. von Flotow was willing to take me as a student, a graduate student, and do some research on space structures control. And at that time, in space research there was this interest in building these very large telescopes. I mean, telescopes, if you can imagine, ten kilometers in length, I mean ten kilometers in length in space, to look deep into the vacuum and see if there are other solar systems, civilizations, so forth. And one of the problems that these large structures had is that they were so long that they would vibrate, and therefore when they vibrated they would affect the focus of the instrument. So, the problem I worked on was could I develop a method that can control these structures to, you know, fractions of an arc, what we call the arc second of angle, very small fraction of an angle, to get the resolution that these instruments needed? And I ended up developing the sensor that could be used to control these vehicles of large spatial extent, and that's what I worked on for my Ph.D. But I worked on it for Andy von Flotow. And in so doing I met so many fantastic people at MIT, and really understood why I was in MIT, just like I had thought. I didn't know what it would be, what the experience would be, but the experience was even better than I could imagine. So, I truly enjoyed it, and to this day I feel like it was one of the best decisions of my entire life, was to go there and be educated at MIT, so--.$Okay, okay. Now, 1992, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory [in Livermore, California]. So, what was going on there?$$So, I chose Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory because at the time, even though it's a Department of Energy facility and tends to work on big physics projects--because Livermore's lab is dominated, again, by scientists as we had an earlier discussion about (laughter). So, big physics happens at Lawrence Livermore Lab. But what they were doing just before I got there is that they had this incredible space project that involved-- you may remember this, as under President [Ronald] Reagan's time, 'Star Wars', do you remember that? And during this time period he put a lot of money into a space shield for the United States that literally, for any intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM] coming from Russia or anywhere, that we could put up and deploy a family of spacecraft that would not only look out for the intercontinental ballistic--ICBMs, but it would also shoot them down in their ascent trajectory. So, I joined that program. Honestly, I joined that program because it was spacecraft and I was excited about being a part of that, to be honest with you. And they had a lot of money. They had a billion dollars of money. Livermore had several hundreds of millions of dollars for this program, and they were looking at the time for a spacecraft engineer to help solve that problem. So, I was in heaven. I was like wow, I get to work on all this stuff, this is great. So, I went to Livermore and I became part of the main team that was working on this problem. And while we were working on that problem we got another big project which was called the Clementine Spacecraft, which was a demonstration program to demonstrate advanced technology that would help legitimize the Star Wars problem. That is, that you could detect ICBMs coming at you and you could shoot them down. So, Clementine was the demonstration project that demonstrated this could be done. So, my job was to do the navigation for the spacecraft, but also help design and analyze some of the instruments, the sensors, the optics that were used to track the ICBMs. So, this turned out to be a great project for me, because what happened was there was a major science part of the project. So, we were going to deploy the spacecraft. It was going to do an orbit around the moon and then after it did an orbit around the moon it was going to fly by an asteroid, the spacecraft. So, I, with a couple of colleagues at National Naval Research Lab was developing the navigation algorithms and the control algorithms for the vehicle. And it turned out that this particular spacecraft with the sensor sweep was the first spacecraft to discover water at the South Pole of the moon, which allows for life to exist on the moon. But no one had confirmed whether there was water on the moon and not at the South Pole. So, this did it at the South Pole. Using the hyper-spectra imagery system that we had, we were able to ascertain that indeed water was present at the South Pole. It was a major discovery in science, and it was such a major discovery in science at the time, that to this day a replica of the Clementine Spacecraft sits in the [National] Air and Space Museum [Smithsonian Institute, Washington, District of Columbia]. So, that was a proud moment for me personally to be a part of that program and a part of that accomplishment with my colleagues from Livermore and from Naval Research Lab. So, I was just lucky, again, in the right place and the right time there to work on that program. And then I worked on several other programs related to uninhabited air vehicles also, for Livermore up until about 1994.$$Okay, okay. That's big stuff. So '94 [1994], is that your last year with Lawrence Livermore?$$That's right. So I ended up having a great time. I worked there from 1992 actually to 1995.