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Meet: Ken Schrock |
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My main job is working with Global Positioning System (GPS) as a navigation means to help launch vehicles and spacecraft know where they are located. There's no demand for a 500,000 pound rocket going 2,000 miles per hour that doesn't know where it is.
| GPS works by taking a very weak signal from
several satellites and using it to find where we are anywhere on the
Earth. I've read that it's like reading from a single light
bulb from 10,000 miles away. Could we use this for Mars?
No, the GPS satellites are in orbit 10,988 nautical miles (66 million
feet) overhead with antennas pointed down.
Before any new rocket or spacecraft leaves the ground, it's been through thousands of hours of testing by engineers. We use a GPS simulator to fake the GPS receiver on the vehicle into thinking it's flying at Mach 12 and 230,000 feet when it's sitting on a table in a lab with a coffee cup on top of it (just kidding about the coffee cup). |
GPS Satellite in final assembly |
Apollo 11 launching
I remember watching the Apollo launches on TV when
I was growing up. Like most children enamored with the program,
I wanted to be an astronaut working for NASA. Yes, I did think drinking
lots of Tang would help my chances of being selected.
Some of the things I enjoyed playing with while I
was in grade school were Legos and Erector sets. I almost always
built some kind of vehicle, rather than buildings. I've also made
model airplanes as far back as I can remember. Usually I made fighter
aircraft, not because of what they could shoot, but because they are always
the most maneuverable of their generation. I never really did get
in to radio control airplanes or rockets, but I plan to with my kids.
To infinity
and beyond
(?, You can do that in a book)
I remember starting to read Science Fiction back in the Second Grade, maybe before. I read The Martian Chronicles, I Robot, The Chronicles of Narnia, Journey to the Center of the Earth, the 2001, Rama, and Dune series, and John Carter of Mars to name a few.
Group sports were never my thing, but I did play Evil Knieval with my bicycle, jumping ramps and curbs. In Junior High I got my first motorcycle, a Honda Trail 70 which I rode for hours on end in the back yard or in the alley. I made my own track and would ride it over and over, continuously trying to get through each section faster or with more finesse.
During high school, I wanted to learn how to make things out of metal. I took almost all of the metal shop (industrial arts) classes, which I enjoyed but was never highly skilled at. There was a computer class, but there was only one computer, and to get in to the class you had to be in your fourth year of math and in physics.
Going to the local Air Force base for the air show was something I always enjoyed. I did spend some time in the Hutchinson, Kansas Aviation Explorer's post. We got to go to Vance AFB in Oklahoma and see the T-37 and T-38 aircraft used for primary and advanced flight training.
One of my high school teachers had been a W.W.II Naval Aviator. He taught what was a basically a private pilot's ground school as an elective. It was one of the few A's I got in high school.
The summer between my Junior and Senior year in High School while on vacation touring the US Air Force Academy, I realized the requirements for being either a fighter pilot or an astronaut required a lot more math and science than I had taken in high school.
I graduated from high school with little planning beyond taking some courses at the local college, working at a grocery store, (street) racing motorcycles and cars, and being a general delinquent.
I told my Hutchinson Community College advisor I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, then he showed me the math and chemistry classes I would have to take just to get where most college freshman engineering majors began their classes. Again, I did not exert myself and did not do well. I became despondent enough over my challenges that I laid out of classes a semester. I began working for a convenience store, since I could get full-time hours. After several scary incidents at this store in the questionable side of town, I finally realized going to college would help me get a better job. That summer I got serious about my studies and took nine hours of classes.
An inspiration for my studies was lots of visits to
the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.
After getting my Associate's degree I went to Wichita
State University majoring in Aeronautical Engineering.
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While at Wichita State University, I did get an internship (sometimes called coop) with (then) Boeing Military Airplanes. I got to work on the flight manuals for KC-135 cargo/tanker aircraft , EC and RC-135 electronic warfare and signal intelligence planes, and VC-25, more commonly known as Air Force One (if the president is on it). Due to some bad economics, I did not get a second coop term, nor the hoped for job offer after graduation. |
Surf's Up
(First Engineering Job, with an office on the beach)
I put out over 100 job applications and finally got
an offer from the Navy to be an Electronics Warfare engineer at Point
Mugu Pacific Missile
Test Center in Southern California. The government classified me as
an Electronics Engineer. I was there three weeks when I was offered to
work flight test on cruise missiles and reconnaissance Unmanned (now Uninhabited
or Robotic) Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Some of the things I learned there
were aerodynamic performance, the design of remotely piloted and autonomous
vehicles, and satellite navigation. I also learned procedures for testing
that were safe and methodical.
While working at Point Mugu, I fulfilled a long time dream of taking flying lessons. Most of my time is in Cessna 150's that I flew out of Point Mugu, Camarillo, Oxnard, and my favorite, Santa Paula. I enjoy old and experimental airplanes which Santa Paula has in abundance.
Since my wife and I decided that she would stay home
with our son, we needed to move to some place that had more economical
housing than the Southern California coast. I found a job at the
Air Force Flight Test Center
at Edwards Air Force base in the California desert. Here I worked
as an Instrumentation Engineer on the F-15 Eagle fighter. 
Here I learned aircraft instrumentation,
telemetry, and programming bizarre computers. This is how the pressure,
temperature, stress, vibration and on-board computer data gets from the
airplane into someone's hands (computer) to analyze. Due to radio
frequency bandwidth limitations, only some of the data is transmitted
to the ground during the test (real time). Everything else is recorded
on to some type of onboard recorder and transferred to a computer after.
The normal recorders when I worked there were 14- and 28-track reel-to-reel
magnetic tape recorders. I was told they cost around $100,000 each.
This is due to the fact that have to be able to work upside down, while
vibrating at 50,000 feet (about 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit), then
land and soak in the 120 degree sun for 16 hours.
I also learned about the techniques to secure equipment and wires on-board a vehicle so they don't come lose and interfere with the safe operation of the plane.
NASA at last!
Thinking of a friend looking for a job, I brought
in a job advertisement to work for NASA
Dryden at Edwards AFB. He showed no interest, but as I read
the position description, I realized that I may qualify and I would finally
get to work for NASA! I got the job as a telemetry engineer (called a
Test Information Engineer TIE at Dryden) working on F-15's, UAVs (haven't
we been there before?) and after some finagling, Dryden's SR-71 Blackbirds. Here the work was the ground
side of what I did on the F-15, receiving and processing flight test telemetry.
There's a lot of work to get a control room ready for 20 engineers to
make safety of flight calls on a one of a kind aircraft.
Edwards AFB is about 60 miles from Death Valley and
does get very hot outside. When I worked on the planes I was outdoors
in the heat. By working with the ground receiving equipment I worked
with the computers that received the data. The computers were sometimes
finicky about the high heat, so they were in nice cool rooms. I
joked with people that was the reason to switch jobs, so I could be inside
from the heat.
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My last project at Dryden was to design the uplink system and Differential Global Positioning Satellite (DGPS) for tracking the X-33 Reusable Launch Vehicle. This was the culmination of everything I had done: UAVs, GPS, flight test, telemetry tracking, receiving and processing. |
Next I worked as a data communications engineer for the CTAS project field site in North Texas. People automatically associate NASA and Texas with Johnson Space Flight Center and the astronauts. I learned to just smile and patiently tell people I worked for NASA Ames Research Center on a joint program with the FAA at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. Being the busiest airport in the world (by number of aircraft landing and taking off), most people have had to wait there one time or another. I often got a response along the lines of, "good, they need to do something."
Since the field site has only a few people at it, we all had to do many jobs. The nickname for my function was ODAA (rhymes with yoda of Star Wars) which stands for Other Duties As Assigned. This means the boss isn't sure what it is you're going to have to do, but they need to have some flexibility to assign you things that pop up along the way. Most NASA civil servants have this ODAA description somewhere on the last page of their annual performance review task listings with something like telemetry data reduction and analysis as their first main task, where mine had nothing but the ODAA descriptor.
For more details on the CTAS project, try going to
the CTAS project home page.
The basic premise is that it's an automation tool for air traffic management.
Dallas/Fort Worth airport is now the busiest airport in the world based
on the number of planes taking off and landing. For this reason,
NASA Ames has established a field site here for research and development
of Air Traffic Management [ATM, not to be confused with Asynchronous Transfer
Mode or Automated Teller Machines ;-) ] with several sites around the
airport for different research data collection. All of these sites need
to share data back and forth with each other and also with off-site locations.
Part of my job was to get these connections made and maintained. As with
most data connections, it's easy when things work as they should. The
real thinking starts when things start looking "funny".
And now you know. . .the rest of the story ;-)
This biplane is a Stearman, the primary Army trainer
for WWII.
My friends that are fans of vintage airplanes would say,
'Real airplanes have two wings and a round engine.'
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