© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering
I’ve been around the space industry for much of my life. I used to take a lot of courses on space at the
Smithsonian in the 60’s. They were some of the best teachers that I ever had. My parents even indulged me and
let me stay up to watch Neal and Buzz take a stroll on the Moon. I even got a tour one day at Comsat where
some smug engineering type was showing off a new miracle battery. It was a gold pack called a Nickel Metal
Hydride. (NiMH) I tried to ask some questions about it and was told “You will never be able to own one.” I guess
he was wrong. I use the things in my WII and usually pay a buck apiece for them.
Had NASA had an exploration plan, I might have actually tried for the astronaut corps. At the time, the schooling
that they wanted didn’t quite match up to the tasks that would be required to be a passenger in their upcoming
space bus. I figured that the best path to space would be to earn the big bucks and buy a ride. The NASA plan
was too lottery like for my tastes.
As I learned more engineering stuff, I ended up working for a little company in the DC area. They happened to
have a contract with Intelsat to build a downlink processor for one of the first satellites to go up in the Space
Shuttle. My job was to design most of the decoding circuit. The box had to decode two different types of data
packets depending on whether the satellite was in the cargo bay or in free flight. There was a big high tech
toggle switch on the front of unit to do the switchover. Sometimes you just need humans for spaceflight.
Someone’s gotta throw the switch!
An offshoot of the Video Titler™ also found use in the space program. We were working with some of the
manufacturers of graphics boards for Titler, and some of them were starting to release capture boards. For these,
we started developing drivers and software for the capture and image processing. Zenith Image Systems got
hold of us and asked us to customize some of the software for some very expensive capture boards, cameras,
and even more expensive printers. The printer was one of the first dye sub printers from Kodak and printed on
12” square heavy duty pages. The thing was so heavy that it bent my desk in half. The desk is still bent.
Why this was relevant was that Zenith Image systems had some very interesting clients. I never did find out what
Ace Frehley was doing with the system, but NASA used our software to help image and catalog the Hubble and
Gamma Ray observatories. The software basically acted as a set of drivers for a database program that allowed
each engineer to individually annotate the images. It also ran a very high resolution JVC camera. It was
interesting to hear the inter office NASA chatter during the first Hubble service mission as they were calling for
photos to see why things were stuck.