Robert Loomis:  

I somehow managed to graduate Michigan State University in 1969 with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and went to work near Baltimore in the Westinghouse Defense and Space Center. I met the Elaine Babiarz, prettiest girl at MSU, the Spring term of my Senior year, and by November we were married and living near Baltimore. While I was working for Westinghouse, I would frequently call one of my best friends who got into a graduate program for civilians sponsored by the Dept. of the Army. It turns out that he spent a half day going to graduate school, went home in the afternoon, was getting a Master’s degree from Texas A&M and was making 25 dollars a year less than I was. Hmmm. So I applied for the program the next year and ended up earning a Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering. (They still think I am a quadruple minority with a speech impediment, though) Upon graduation, having learned all that was left in the world to learn, I was assigned to a place called Picatinny Arsenal, in northwest New Jersey. I ended up working for a Program Manager, modernizing munitions production facilities at various places around the country. In interesting job affording a lot of travel, and also an interesting area in which to live – mountainous and rural, but incredibly cold in the winter! It was during that time period that Kristina (1976) and James (1978) were born. It was then that I realized that one of my earlier assumptions was wrong, and there was teenie-weenie bit of stuff that I did not know, so I managed to once again trick the Army into sending me back to school. There was a catch, though. I could attend any school I wished and take any (relevant) course material I wished but I could only do it for a year. I decided to go back to Texas A&M and work on a Ph.D. I knew the school and liked it and I.E. program, and after 7 years in New Jersey we were ready for some warm weather! So we moved back to Texas and I did the year of schooling. During that time I also found a job in working for the Army in Texas, so that after the schooling, we stayed in Texas and I taught in the same Master’s degree program that I had previously been a student in. During that time period, our third child Dustin (1982) was born. I continued teaching in the Master’s program and then moved for a short time to a facility in Corpus Christi while finishing my research and dissertation, and finally, having this time for sure learning everything there was to know, graduated with a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering. About that time I got a call from a former classmate who worked in northern Virginia for the Army Materiel Command with a job offer. It was a great offer and we ended up moving to Springfield, VA in 1985. I ended up replacing my friend as Branch Chief of the Computers and Software Branch, in charge of Army Software Policy and responsible for nine Life Cycle Software Engineering Centers, scattered around the country. I then got another offer from another classmate (yes, I know) and moved from the Dept. of the Army to NASA Headquarters. It was pretty cool, as my office was on the third floor and I looked out directly across Pennsylvania Ave at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I worked in the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance as the Manager of Data Systems and Trend Analysis. After a couple of years there, I was on a trip to the Kennedy Space Center, and son of a gun, I had an offer from (at the time), NASA’s largest contractor, Lockheed Space Operations Company. LSOC was responsible for processing the Shuttle at KSC, and this was during the return to flight after the Challenger disaster. It was an interesting and challenging time, and we ended up moving to Florida in the late 1988. We designed and built our own house on Merritt Island on the water and happily spent about ten years there, by far the longest we had lived anywhere since we got married. I ran the Trend Analysis group there and did all kinds of special studies and activities relating to reliability, quality and safety of Shuttle related ground processing systems. Great jobs for a techie – nerdy guy like me. In a way, I have been lucky in my career. From fairly early on, my jobs have involved management, but they have also been highly technical in nature, which is what I like the best. Anyway, after about ten years of working at KSC, I was asked to move to Houston and became Director of Mission Assurance for the United Space Alliance (which is what LSOC had evolved into). This was a Corporate Officer position and the first that did not allow me to get dirt under my fingernails. It was interesting and I did it for a couple of years but then I got yet another call from a classmate that was working at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, a center co-located with Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. Ahhh, back to both hardware and management! DFRC does aeronautical research and took me away from the Shuttle Program. What cool place! All kinds of small and large programs and projects. Everything from shining lasers at model airplanes with solar cells to see if they could fly at night, to building giant solar powered aircraft with wingspans that rivaled a 747, to airplanes with wings that morphed to improve efficiency at different speeds, to airplanes with the wings on Ã...Expand for more