Challenging Toys/Projects

Here's some photos of projects I've worked on, created, nurtured, and/or produced. I thought these might be particularly interesting to my commercial cohorts who have little concept of what aerospace is about, and vice versa, as well as my software cohorts regarding hardware, and vice versa. And I mean real hardware like structures, jet engines, and rockets -- not just computers.

Cubic used a lot of technology to manage fare collection for large transit systems worldwide.

Cybersensor's websites made extensive use of javascript servlets & dynamic HTML to provide users with flyover menus and configurable, tree-style user interfaces.

Lunar's new Prodigy combines a Cad-Zinc-Telluride array detector with a slick NT user interface, More notably, the software is very extensible with extensive exception handling and unique error reporting.

Lunar's Achilles Express is half the size and cost of its predecessor. Inflated membranes enable the benefits of ultrasound water coupling while keeping the user "dry".

DIRECTV's Castle Rock Broadcast Center, 30 miles south of Denver, Colorado provides 175+ channels thru a pizza-size home dish to the whole USA

CRBC's main operator consoles and lots of software allow this facility to operate with less than one staff per channel for a full 7/24.

Convair's AGM-129A Advanced Cruise Missile, a direct descendant of one of my DARPA initiatives that was nick-named Teal Dawn (gee, I wonder where he came up with that name?). No, the picture is not upside down and backward, and do not let anyone tell you how easy it is to design forward swept wings with today's modern structural analysis software.

Submunitions precisely dispensed and delivered (here by Convair's Tomahawk) after flying autonomously for hundreds of miles; UTC's Advanced Systems Division developed similar dispensers for Northrop's Tri-Service Standoff Attack Missile (TSSAM).

General Dynamics Convair's Tomahawk of Desert Storm fame. We'll never think of a milk factory the same again. It was nice to see that autonomous precision guidance actually worked.

MRASM was a reduced-cost, joint-service, non-nuclear, air-launched derivative of Tomahawk.

Philips Medical's Image Processing Module (IPM) still needed specialized hardware in the eighties for Digital Subtraction Angiography and digital Radiography.

An imaging laser radar scene circa 1977 -- one of my DARPA "zero-CEP" initiatives. The pseudo- color corresponds to distance. FYI, a scene's geometry is much more stable and harder to hide than its intensity.

This was the first launch of the Hexagon military satellite. What a great first job! You've never heard "loud" until you are up close to a large rocket.

I further regressed and built an N-Scale train layout in the alcove above the fireplace in our Wisconsin playroom.

It started out with buying a pretty little model of a steam engine for the train line that ran across the river from where Alicia grew up.

Of course, then I needed to buy some track and cars, and then a model of a coal mine, and then...I'm now trying to convince myself that this is big enough and that I really don't need more practice in landscaping, my new CAD program for rail layouts, and other such new skills.