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The Best Years fo my Life. Really
Voyager, Vger to Startrek Fans
I was fortunate in working for JPL in Pasadena, Calif. off and on for 20 years. Very fortunate. I had been laid off (again) and it was not even my fault. My boss/owner was from Taiwan and the US had just "recognized" Red China. At least 2 of the few Americans got the axe the same day. Best thing that ever happened to me. I went home in a daze and there was a message on my phone machine. I called and he asked would I consider a job working for JPL. "Yes", calmly, " I would consider it", Who do I have to kill, I thought.
Well, they needed engineers to work in Mission Control for the Voyager Project, coming up on Jupiter's timely photo op. The start of the Grand Tour of the Galilean Gas Giants who where in a rare alignment. I was on the data monitoring team. Data Systems Engineer (DSE) for the next 3 encounters but missed the last encounter with Neptune (too old, he said, at 45 I said?) So I applied for an opening for a Mission Controller (ACE) for a little satellite named Ampte. No one else has heard of it either, but I got 2 years experience as ACE and so got picked up on the Magellan mission to Venus to radar map it. Launch to EOM (End of Mission). And it launched from the Shuttle but I was not the lucky ACE to go to the Cape as liaison for JPL. I am not complaining though. One thing Magellan did was pioneer the Aero Breaking technique, scuffing the atmosphere on each orbit to slow it down to a circular orbit. That is now designed into every new mission that can use it. But I have not seen the Venus Google map yet. Mars got theirs! Oh well.
Then they fried Magellan in the atmosphere on purpose, supposedly to gather data, actually so they could free up money for new projects. Bad move, but they did not ask me. Billions spent getting it there and throw it away to get a few million for a new project *Faster, Better, Cheaper", Which never worked well. Lost 2 Mars craft to stupid mistakes caused by "Cheaper". But they did not ask me.
After Magellan, I worked on Galileo, which was given an extended mission and I worked as ACE there for several years. Remember that the Spacecraft antenna was an umbrella king og thing and due to sitting in the shed for several years before launch, it got stuck and never became operational. The craft could only communicate at a very low comm rate on the emergency low data rate antenna and transceiver. Some very smart folks got together and worked out many tweaks and pokes to the ground receivers and antennas, on board processing of data, and some very fancy compression programming. The data rate was raised from the 8 to 16 bits per second of the low gain to 160 bps vice the originally designed for 134 kilobits nominal. A gain of 10 times. Then the compression algorithms made an effective rate more like 1000bps. The processing of the data before sending it trimmed maybe half more (like cropping the image to only contain rear picture of object, etc.). Last, they were in elliptical orbit, so they could sling shot around the Jupiter system to get to all the moons. And so they scheduled transmission over the month or so they were between moon encounters. There was a backup tape recorder that was pressed into service for that playback and capture. Quite an elaborate save.
JPL, who was in full bore Cheaper mode, laid of many older employees, including myself. Many happened to have a little more experience than the cheap smart young grads that replaced them, and might have noticed the difference in metric and English values that lost one Mars mission. So I looked around for an equally exciting and rewarding job. Fat chance.
I did manage to get on part of the X-33 Shuttle replacement project run by Lockheed. I worked for NASA at Edwards AFB/Dryden. We were building the Final-25 mile landing tracking system, which was mounted in the trailer of a semi-truck. That was fun but the project died a year later when NASA and Lockheed tried to see who would blink first and nobody did, so instead of replacing a $200 m fiberglass gas tank, they quietly dropped the project that had already spent about $2 billion. But they did not ask me.
So I retired to live in the desert, and there I be.
Well, they needed engineers to work in Mission Control for the Voyager Project, coming up on Jupiter's timely photo op. The start of the Grand Tour of the Galilean Gas Giants who where in a rare alignment. I was on the data monitoring team. Data Systems Engineer (DSE) for the next 3 encounters but missed the last encounter with Neptune (too old, he said, at 45 I said?) So I applied for an opening for a Mission Controller (ACE) for a little satellite named Ampte. No one else has heard of it either, but I got 2 years experience as ACE and so got picked up on the Magellan mission to Venus to radar map it. Launch to EOM (End of Mission). And it launched from the Shuttle but I was not the lucky ACE to go to the Cape as liaison for JPL. I am not complaining though. One thing Magellan did was pioneer the Aero Breaking technique, scuffing the atmosphere on each orbit to slow it down to a circular orbit. That is now designed into every new mission that can use it. But I have not seen the Venus Google map yet. Mars got theirs! Oh well.
Then they fried Magellan in the atmosphere on purpose, supposedly to gather data, actually so they could free up money for new projects. Bad move, but they did not ask me. Billions spent getting it there and throw it away to get a few million for a new project *Faster, Better, Cheaper", Which never worked well. Lost 2 Mars craft to stupid mistakes caused by "Cheaper". But they did not ask me.
After Magellan, I worked on Galileo, which was given an extended mission and I worked as ACE there for several years. Remember that the Spacecraft antenna was an umbrella king og thing and due to sitting in the shed for several years before launch, it got stuck and never became operational. The craft could only communicate at a very low comm rate on the emergency low data rate antenna and transceiver. Some very smart folks got together and worked out many tweaks and pokes to the ground receivers and antennas, on board processing of data, and some very fancy compression programming. The data rate was raised from the 8 to 16 bits per second of the low gain to 160 bps vice the originally designed for 134 kilobits nominal. A gain of 10 times. Then the compression algorithms made an effective rate more like 1000bps. The processing of the data before sending it trimmed maybe half more (like cropping the image to only contain rear picture of object, etc.). Last, they were in elliptical orbit, so they could sling shot around the Jupiter system to get to all the moons. And so they scheduled transmission over the month or so they were between moon encounters. There was a backup tape recorder that was pressed into service for that playback and capture. Quite an elaborate save.
JPL, who was in full bore Cheaper mode, laid of many older employees, including myself. Many happened to have a little more experience than the cheap smart young grads that replaced them, and might have noticed the difference in metric and English values that lost one Mars mission. So I looked around for an equally exciting and rewarding job. Fat chance.
I did manage to get on part of the X-33 Shuttle replacement project run by Lockheed. I worked for NASA at Edwards AFB/Dryden. We were building the Final-25 mile landing tracking system, which was mounted in the trailer of a semi-truck. That was fun but the project died a year later when NASA and Lockheed tried to see who would blink first and nobody did, so instead of replacing a $200 m fiberglass gas tank, they quietly dropped the project that had already spent about $2 billion. But they did not ask me.
So I retired to live in the desert, and there I be.
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