After my baseball career down the road at the road at Georgetown College fizzled out, I transferred to UK in the fall of 2009. This change brought me to the UK’s Physics and Astronomy department and changed the trajectory of my career. I participated in some exciting astronomy research with Dr. Wilhelm at the McDonald Observatory in Texas, I struggled through Dr. Gardner’s quantum class , presented research at a conference in Hawaii, and received funding to attend the International Space University through UK’s Huffaker Scholarship and the American Astronautical Society Scholarship.
After graduating in 2011, I had a brief internship working on Space Policy at the Commercial Spaceflight Federation in Washington, DC. Once that was completed, I packed my bags and spent the summer at the International Space University (ISU) in Graz, Austria. ISU provides graduate-level training and cultural experiences to the future leaders of the emerging global aerospace community. During this 10-week certificate program, I worked alongside 122 students from 30 countries on lectures, tests, workshops, and group projects. A video summary of this experience can be found on YouTube.
After that summer I made my way out west to the University of Colorado Boulder to start a graduate program in Aerospace Engineering Sciences. While at CU, I worked on a group project to design crew system interfaces for the Dream Chaser spacecraft, was selected as one of Aviation Week’s 20 Twenties honorees, conducted PhD research on novel spacecraft life support technologies, and started an internship at Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) in Louisville, CO.
After a couple of years of various tasks at SNC (2012 – 2014) - designing thermal protection system tiles, testing crew systems interfaces, managing interface requirements for launch vehicles, oxygen and carbon dioxide gas analysis, and spacecraft probabilistic penetration equations - I started my first job at a rocket manufacturing and operations company called United launch Alliance (ULA). While at ULA I helped integrate and launch several missions including the asteroid hunting OSIRIS-REx and several of Cygnus’s ISS Cargo Resupply missions for NASA. In addition, I helped develop ULA’s new Crew Access Tower that is now being used to launch crew and cargo missions for NASA.
After a few years at ULA (2014 – 2016), I got married to my best friend and we spent six months traveling around the world, before returning to the states to start planting some roots. In 2017, I returned to Sierra Nevada Corporation (now Sierra Space Corporation) in Colorado, to help develop their new cargo variant of the Dream Chaser spacecraft.
Over the past ~7 years I’ve been privileged to work with a great team of people who are creating a space plane cargo delivery and return system with a goal to transport science experiments and equipment to the astronauts on the International Space Station. After berthing and unloading at the ISS, it will be refilled and will return to Earth to land on a runway, similar to the Space Shuttle Orbiter.
I’ve held various roles over the years at Sierra Space, but currently I lead our Cargo and Mission Integration Team for the Dream Chaser Program. I’m responsible for managing and implementing our contractual cargo/payload services and requirements, leading mission milestone reviews for NASA payments, and developing future capabilities. We are currently working with Lexington based Space Tango to fly one of their payloads on our first mission.
Looking back on my time since leaving UK, I feel very grateful for the breadth of opportunities I’ve been able to be a part of. UK provided the foundation and resources for me to follow my curiosity, explore the universe, and make many friends along the way. I now have a 15-month-old daughter who is reading “Quantum Physics for Babies,” so maybe one-day, she won’t struggle with Quantum as much as I did.