You remember Zane Burley, the old coot whose cubicle mine faced, the electrical engineer for whom I did the drafting and design? Gray hair. REALLY sloppy markups (think doctor’s writing). But I read it fine, and learned a lot from him.
LOL. When things were beginning their downward trajectory at ORA – right after they moved me to a new office space far, far away in a new expansion area on the same floor. I brought Connie up there to show her the view one night.
Well, one thing leading to another as it always does with me, we ended up half-naked on the glass table in the conference room. Dark… Skyline view of the city… Full moon…
ZANE BURLEY walking out of the elevator!
We scurried to make ourselves presentable. Explained why I was there.
Phew. That was close. . . Kind of makes you wonder, though. Zane did live a few blocks from the office.
The firm must have had an APB (All Points Bulletin like they do on Dragnet) out on me with the building security. If this guy uses his key card to enter the office during off hours. CALL US. NIGHT or DAY.
Call. Us.
What. The. F? What is WRONG with these people? I work like an effing slave for ten damn years. Make them a bloody fortune. And, what – they watch my every move? Suspect me of, God knows what?
Stealing a drafting pencil?
Anyway, rewind to April 1993. I sent a slightly detailed report of my NASA research (what little I could still remember) to a professor at the University of Texas across town, Victor Szebehely. I said I’d read his book Adventures in Celestial Mechanics, and I’m enclosing a short paper on a little theory I had. Could he please share with me any ideas?
He wrote back. Recommended I submit my paper to the Journal of Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. I did a little more work on the details and submitted it. No luck. It wasn’t up to their standards by any way, shape or form.
A year later, I wrote back to Dr. Z, with two more short papers I had worked on about the NASA research. He wrote back, a handwritten note again – suggesting I try a more popular publication instead of a scientific journal.
As good fortune would have it, Zane was an astronomy guy. We made those special glasses to watch a solar eclipse then they dropped by. Stood outside on the tile patio looking down at the little moon-crescent shapes in the shadows.
Zane was like a grandpa to me. He had a giant poster of a POLAR BEAR in front of his desk. I met his wife at July 4th receptions ORA had on the patio, to watch the fireworks over Town Lake (now it’s over the concrete parking garage.) They had a place on Canyon Lake down near San Antonio.
Zane used to show me copies of the local astronomy club’s newsletter, The Sidereal Times. (I had a framed copy of the NASA letter in my little office space. Only one person ever asked me about it. William. He had been a monk for a while before he studied architecture.)
I sent one of the short papers I’d sent to Dr. Z on the Solar System to the astronomy club – with details like I talked about earlier, but with a new sketch and a couple of tables showing calculations. They published it. May 1994.
The class I took when I started working for The Delphi Group in the spring of 1997? That was Victor Szebehely’s Theory of Orbits class on Regularization. It was the very last class he taught.
Dr. Z was (I later learned) fighting cancer at the time and in chemo. I presented the NASA paper as my class project. Got an A. He REALLY liked the project. “All you need to do is figure out the time constant and you’ll get your name lit up in lights.”
I’d destroyed all the NASA research, but I worked so damn long on it, the method was hard-wired in my brain. The first couple of summaries were like I did originally after the original inspiration, when I was in that apartment uptown off Speedway, watching the Star Trek TV show for the first time.
For Dr. Z’s class project, I completely re-did the work I created on the Apple II E computer at WSMR, but this time using a spreadsheet to do the calculations and plot out the results. It was basically doing the analysis all over again.
I got the same results, which is a good sign – if you reach the same result through a whole new analysis.
Dr. Z and I talked a little in his office after class one day. He encouraged me to go to grad school. When I finally decided to give it a try later that semester, he gave me a letter of recommendation. As former Chairman of the Aerospace Department and, well – the smartest guy on campus and the most important researcher in Celestial Mechanics of the modern era (none of which I knew at the time) well – all I need to do now is pass the damn Graduate Record Exams.
I take the GRE tests. They were on a computer. I aced the math. The reading comprehension went okay. But I thought I did really bad on the vocabulary part and damn near deleted the scores. (You can delete them and there will be no record so you can try again from scratch.) But I – accepted.
Turns out my vocabulary scores were excellent!! The test gives you harder and harder words if you give the right answers. Who knew? (I’d had grad school in the back of my mind for years already, studying GRE words on the bus all the time.)
So. Mr. Bill goes to grad school!
It’s the fall of 1997. My book Retrofitting for Energy Conservation had just come out from McGraw-Hill. I’d just submitted the final draft of Electrical Design Guide for Commercial Buildings. I recall making corrections to their proofs on the bus ride to campus.
I was on a fellowship – $1000 a month – and worked as a Teaching Assistant (TA), mostly for a statics and dynamics professor, Anthony Bedford – teaching evening homework classes, grading papers, grading exams, holding office hours to help.
Dr. Szebehely passed away right after the semester began. My new advisor was Roger Broucke, probably the #2 most important worker in Celestial Mechanics of the modern era. Short. Rotund. Belgian. Jolly. VERY thick glasses. Couldn’t hardly see behind his outstretched hand.
Mars was in the news a lot at this time. Bad news, actually. Several landers had failed to reach Mars. NASA failed. Japan failed. The Russians failed. After a year of basic orbital mechanics classes, I decided to make a computer model of the Earth to Mars trajectory.
Dr. Broucke was a real computer guru. Wrote several programs in machine code. Who does that?! His language was FORTRAN.
dBase, the program I’d used to make all my engineering design software (which at this point was on the label Bar X Software, my new DBA operation; and I was giving away free copies to help sell my McGraw-Hill textbooks) was very similar to FORTRAN, so that’s the language I used.
Not many people used FORTRAN. I had to purchase my own compiler and do all my programming at home. (They had a computer lab on campus. But no FORTRAN.) Everybody used C+ and C++. This would be an issue later on, but for now, I was racking my brains trying to solve an impossible problem.
The Earth to Mars trajectory is EXTREMELY nonlinear. The only way NASA or anybody else can get a solution is with a genetic algorithm. Basically, you try one solution a dozen times, take the result that gets the closest to Mars; use that solution to generate a dozen more trajectories; take the closest one, etcetera.
I took my approximate solution and plugged it into one of those optimization routines I’d learned. It locked up the routine. Bad news bears.
I had divided my model into two parts, separating the problem roughly halfway to Mars. It was a standard NASA trajectory with a couple of thrusts to get away from Earth, another thrust at “conjunction”(about halfway there), and then a couple more thrusts to get into orbit around Mars.
Getting away from Earth is no problem. The killer is landing on Mars. What happens is that the spacecraft is in an elliptical orbit (with the Sun at the main focus), and the elongated part stretches out to Mars.
That e-long part of the ellipse is where the spacecraft goes the slowest. Meanwhile, Mars is on an almost circular orbit. The thrust the spacecraft needs to match your spacecraft to Mars is on the order of 2.5 kilometers/second.
Huh. 2.5 km/sec. That doesn’t sound like very much.
Convert it to English units, and it’s over 5000 miles per hour! That means when you approach Mars, the Red Planet is going 5000+ miles per hour faster than you are!!!
You can see why the genetic algorithm is needed. Raw Cray supercomputer POWER.
I bundled up all my computer printouts and plots and color diagrams and brought them in to Dr. Brocke’s office one day. This is my third semester or so, the spring of 1999.
Looking at my diagrams (holding them real close, his eyes were so bad), Dr. Broucke mentioned something like, “You know you can integrate backwards in time if all the forces are gravity.” That’s how they study the evolution of the solar system – where all the forces in the model are just gravity – as it evolved from the past.
I don’t know, maybe a few weeks later I stopped. Looked at my data. And there it was. O.M.G.
I’d long since split the impossible problem in half at the middle. I can solve the conjunction-to-Mars problem and the conjunction-to-Earth problem (integrating backward in time) and just splice them together at conjunction. It took some fancy programming tricks and a gazillion trials. But it worked.
Yahoo! I got to Mars.
You hear the deadly silence? The pin drop?
That was the last conversation I had with Dr. Broucke, other than related to his courses in Celestial Mechanics I took. (Hint: Mr. Bill’s 20-page algorithm running on a desktop PC for 30 seconds doing better than NASA running millions of lines of code on a Cray Supercomputer for days on end?)
“Oh, no. It’s Mr. Bill.”
SPLAT!
Dr. Broucke and I didn’t even talk when I went in to get advice on course selection for that semester. (Mom called him at some point to see what was going on. She said he talked about the weather.) As time went on. . . at the end of each semester, I just filled out the form with the courses I wanted to take. He signed it. That’s that.
This went on for two years.
I took SIX credits of “Thesis Classes,” which are so your advisor can help you write your Master’s thesis. No feedback from Dr. Broucke. Nor with EIGHTEEN credits of “Research Classes.”
All I got from Dr. Broucke is, “It’s Department policy to not give feedback to any student until they pass their Ph.D. qualifying exams.”
How the F does anybody get a Master’s Degree based on a thesis?
To hell with you, then. I was busy otherwise, taking all the classwork for an MSE – then for the doctorate. I was going for a Ph.D. anyway, and the ASE Department has an option where you can get the doctorate without first getting a Master’s.
But still. Can’t you look at my result? Read the code – it’s only 20 pages long. I even made a self-extracting executable zip file. Extract it. Input a few numbers. It calculates the full trajectory. Prints out the entire flight path solution in three dimensions.
Five. Minutes. All I ask is. Five. Minutes.
None of the half-dozen orbits people would tell me squat. It was infuriating!
I guess they thought I was cheating. But I wasn’t. My little routine came up with a direct solution every time. No genetic algorithm iterations. Directly to Mars every time. 20 pages of FORTRAN code, compiled, running on a 486 PC spit out a solution in 30 seconds. Boom. Done.
I assumed, at this point, that my Mars Pathfinder routine wasn’t good enough. I need to do more.
So I tested out a few ideas. I added some options to the routine. Try them out. Refine the code. I FLASH on a way to not only get to Mars but figure out how to use 15% less fuel. Not just on my special orbit. But using 15% less fuel on ANY trajectory to Mars.
Fuel not used on actually getting to Mars equals a large payload. More time on station. More room to carry a dirt sample back from Mars. People get dissertations for figuring out how to save a few GRAMS. How about TONS!
I complained to the Chairman of the Department, Dr. Dolling. No comment.
So. You wanna play hardball?
I boycotted all my classes that semester. Dr. Dolling gives in and sets up a seminar where I can present my Mars research. “The Earth to Mars Trajectory as a Four Body Problem.”
Like, with all the failed Mars missions lately – wasn’t’ ANYBODY interested in a “faster, safer, cheaper” Mars solution?
A couple of the orbits professors showed up at my seminar (Dr. Broucke wasn’t even there). NASA was there, a man from Houston. I explain my results. There were a few questions. We’re done.
I ran into Dr. Abusali, one of the associate orbits professors who works at the Texas Center for Space Research in north Austin, a year later. He was surprised I was still on campus.
“Wasn’t that your dissertation defense?” No. I still haven’t taken my exams yet.
What was the reaction of the tenured orbits professors at the seminar? They finally did a study of my project (more on this later) a year+ later. In the report, Dr. Schutz writes, “We didn’t ask any questions because we didn’t want to embarrass Mr. Clark.” (quote-unquote, in an OFFICIAL document that was used to EXPEL me)
They assigned me a second advisor after the seminar, Dr. Cesar Ocampo. I brought all my Mars research into his office. He gave me a big stack of NASA’s computer-generated solutions, called “pork chop plots.” I take them home.
I returned the NASA plots a week later. My solution isn’t in there.
Dr. Ocampo made some snide, snotty remark. . .
I just turned around and left before I said something like, “My Mars solution has a way to shave 15% off the energy used for every one of your goddamn NASA pork chops. Put that on your barby and grill it. “
Dr. Ocampo quit as my advisor.
They assign me a new one (a new second advisor, that is), Dr. Wallace Fowler. I try and talk to him about my Mars project, to get some feedback, but he always tells me, “Not until after you pass your Ph.D. qualifying exams.
We’re in the spring semester of 2001 now. I’m scheduled to take the written qualifying exams in the first week of June. The math exam is a killer. I’ve been studying for that damn exam for three solid years. It covers the equivalent of an entire undergraduate degree in math, and then some. I audited the two-semester math course one year. Took it the next.
Then – having bypassed the exams the previous summer because of really bad vision problems (severe dry eye, as in EXTREME) – studying it all this year.
I’m still damn frustrated about my Mars Pathfinder 1.0 solution. I had no idea what the problem was with all those professors. Nothing else to do but to create a better simulation for them. Maybe that will get their attention.
So, I buy a copy of Winteracter, a FORTRAN application, and create a GUI (Graphical User Interface), a full-blown Windows application with all the bells and whistles.
(Yeah, this is me – the CEO of Bar X Software.)
Help screens Color graphics on the screen. A series of inputs. I put it on the web. Folks love it! THINK MARS. The Mars Society Folks. Several professors at other universities use the program in their classes as an educational tool.
But it’s not just a Mars Pathfinder 2.0 routine. It’s a test platform. Hundreds of folks trying it. No errors. No feedback. This damn program actually gets a solution to the infamous Mars problem.
The folks at UT? No comment. They refuse to try it. “Pass your qualifying exams first.”
Sorry, guys, too late for that. . .
If you’re not counting, I have now created THREE excellent dissertations: (1) a computer program on the Mars trajectory that is a superb educational tool, (2) a direct solution to the Earth to Mars trajectory, and now (3) a way to shave 15% off the energy needed for ANY mission to Mars.
I write up a paper on the program. Submit it to the student section of the Institute of Astronautical and Aeronautical Engineers, the AIAA, the main organization for aerospace engineers. They put it on their website. I tell my advisor. He calls the AIAA and has them remove it immediately.
Say – what? Hello – hand raised – I’m a Professional Engineer. You can’t do that.
The same paper is accepted at the annual Mars Society meeting that summer. Normally they pay for grad students to go to seminars like that to present their research. Hell, to show a poster – much less present a formal, official scientific paper.
(You’ll recall that I’m, like, very good at science papers. I’ve published more papers than many tenured professors.) Not me. I can’t go to the MARS Society meeting to talk about my MARS research while all the world is trying to land successfully on MARS. I have to withdraw the paper from the conference.
It was never published. Not then. Not since then.
Come June, I pass two of the written qualifying exams but fail the math. Three math professors give me a three-hour oral make-up exam. I don’t miss a single question in all three hours. (I had taken classes from two of the professors but not the third. Fortunately, I researched her, found out she taught Fourier methods, a very small part of the whole math curriculum. I boned up on that area – extensively. . . Good thing I did that because ALL her questions were in that ONE small area.)
Hah. One of the professors, Clint Dawson, actually voted that I failed the oral math exam. I didn’t miss a single question! He’s now Chairman of the Aerospace Department. Doesn’t that say it all?
After I failed the math exam, Dr. Broucke quit as my advisor. He’s retired now. Out of the picture.
Now Dr. Fowler is my only advisor. I have a meeting with him at the end of the summer. He tells me, “All you need to do is pass the oral exam, write up your Mars research, and you’ll graduate next semester.” (Not the math oral exam. The Ph.D. qualifying exams have a written and an oral part.)
Dr. Fowler wants to set up a time to do a practice exam, like professors always do. I say not yet. Dr. Broucke just quit and I need to find another professor to do the oral exam.
Based on my experience with the math oral re-exam, I need to find out their specialty and study it exhaustively. Dr. Fowler says that’s okay. Just make it soon before you forget all your orbits.
A few days later, I get hauled in and read the riot act by my Graduate Advisor, Dr. David Hull. He’s the optimization guru in the Aerospace Department. (Hint: the ONE man who should have been the MOST interested because I just came up with an awesome new way to optimize trajectories, his main interest in life.)
“You’re barred from registering for classes for next semester. If you don’t pass the oral qualifying exam before the end of the semester, you’re out of the program.”
Say again? Isn’t this where you put me on probation? Like you would do for any other student? I just passed the damn written exams, the toughest set of exams on campus. Hell, in the whole world (everybody else gives those exams one each semester. We take all three in one week).
My value should have gone way UP.
Not way DOWN.
Enough already. I get all my Army and VA disability papers and bring them over to the Office of Students with Disabilities. I’m disabled. I’m 45 years old, therefore a student older than average. I’m a Viet Nam veteran. That’s three protected classes. I request your assistance to get reasonable accommodation.
“You have to submit a formal statement in writing.”
I go home and get to work on the grievance. It’s not as if I haven’t had a LOT of practice writing the damn things.