Pioneer Rocketplane
Vandenberg AFB, CA November 1997 to July 1999

Systems Engineer Employee #5 of start-up company.

Controlled system engineering process for Reusable Launch Vehicle development company. Generated, flowed down, and tracked requirements. Verified that requirements were met by new designs. Maintained configuration control of evolving design. Developed operations concepts and anomaly scenarios. Planned and executed System Requirements Review and System Design Review. Team followed a spiral development process, described in paper written for Master's program.

Developed trajectory analysis code in C to evaluate performance of launch vehicle design options. Original code used analytic optimization to find best trajectory. Later upgrade used genetic algorithms to find global optimum by searching broader solution space. Modular design allowed change of optimization method without altering other parts of simulation. Ported OTIS Fortran legacy code to Windows to support NASA contract work.

Performed market analysis and developed vehicle growth options to determine most profitable system payload capacity. Wrote market analysis and marketing strategy for business plan.

Performed trade studies to find optimum vehicle configurations. Found sensitivity of vehicle performance to all measurable parameters to support trade studies and improved vehicle designs. Presented paper on design issues.