Electronic NewsletterVolume 1, Number 5
October 1998
Electronic Newsletter
As October begins, I hope everyone is looking forward to the
amazing NAAA Conference. For those who won't be able to make it to
Washington, we will post pictures and accounts of the events on the
website. This month looks to be an exciting one for the NAAA, as many
of the things we have planned all year are now coming to fruition.
The summer included three new Academy classes, reunions and
get-togethers at the various Centers, and the traditional end-of-summer
video conference between the groups and introducing the NAAA. Again
this year we are planning a big annual event for the alumni. Last
year's was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC,
and events included the first NAAA Congress, poster sessions, and the
banquet including dinner speakers Dave Thompson (President of Orbital),
Joe Rothenberg (present NASA AA for Space Flight), and Al Diaz (present
GSFC Director). Amazingly, this year we are going to top even that!
This year, what we hope will be the first annual NAAA Fall
Conference was chosen to coincide with NASA's 40th Anniversary
celebrations, commemorating the founding of NASA in October, 1958. The
capstone of the weekend will be a gala, all you can eat and drink, at
the National Building Museum with speakers Dan Goldin (NASA Administrator)
and President Bill Clinton! With luck, everything will go as planned
and Mr. Clinton will join us - you never know until he walks in the door,
but he has confirmed his plans to speak. We are grateful to have been
invited to join in this event by NASA and the AIAA.
Prior to the evening of festivities and as part of the conference
activities, the NAAA will be hosting a public panel discussion at NASA
Headquarters entitled: "The Next Forty Years: A Vision of Humanity's Future
in Space." The NAAA has been working with Alan Ladwig's office at NASA HQ
to coordinate this event. The theme is NASA's 40th anniversary, and each
of the four panelists will present a brief statement of their "vision" for
the next 40 years. An open discussion will follow. What is truly special
about this event is that it came about due to the NAAA, and it is really
the only public activity NASA is holding in Washington for the 40th
anniversary. This event is going a long way toward establishing the NAAA
as an important asset to NASA in the minds of several senior officials,
and we hope it will get people thinking about the future too.
Saturday will bring a VIP tour of Goddard Space Flight Center,
the Second NAAA Congress with some interesting discussion groups, and a
dinner at Dr. Jerry Soffen's home, founder of the NASA Academy program.
We'll have plenty of time for touring DC and for going out at night, so
we'll be able to catch up with both old and new friends. In addition, we
will be gearing up for the NAAA elections for 1999 officers. What should
the next 10 years bring for the NASA Academy Alumni Association?
In conjunction with the weekend commemorating the past and future
of NASA, the theme for the weekend will revolve around our own group. We
are a growing group of motivated, intelligent, ambitious, and capable
students and young professionals. In our ranks are Ph.D.'s, Founders,
Directors, and Vice Presidents of entrepreneurial space companies,
spacecraft designers, and without exception, outstanding scientists and
engineers. What do we do with this assemblage and how do we interact with
the outstanding program that brought us together? What do each of us want
out of the NAAA? What do each of us expect to get? What can we each give,
and why? These are some questions we hope to answer in conference rooms,
restaurants and bars this weekend as we plan for the future. It promises
to be a great weekend! I look forward to either seeing you there or
telling you all about it. Have a great October!
David J. Goldstein
The 1998 NAAA Election is coming up in a few weeks, at which time the
members of the NAAA will vote to elect the next NAAA Executive Council
(EC), consisting of a President, Vice President of Operations, and Vice
President of Finance.
The timeline for the NAAA Election has been shifted such that the close
of the nomination period will fall one week after the Annual Conference.
This year's schedule is:
Holding an elected office is just one of the ways NASA Academy Alumni can
become involved with the NAAA. To find out more about the three EC
positions, and other appointed positions within the NAAA, visit
Frequently Asked Questions at
To be eligible to vote, or to run for office, you must be a current
member in NAAA. If it has been more than one year since you submitted a
membership form, simply fill out the online membership form at
As a point of information, the NAAA has the beginnings of becoming
a powerful force in the space community. Its name is already well
recognized within NASA headquarters, and it allows many doors to be
opened to some of the top staff. With this years conference which
coincides with the 40th anniversary, the current officers have set up
a panel discussion which is going to give the group unprecedented
coverage in and out of NASA. By mentioning your affiliation with the
NAAA as an officer, you can work very closely with people like Senior
Advisor Alan Ladwig, to move programs like this forward, and since the
NAAA is only in its second year, you basically have free reign to
direct the program in which direction you choose.
So, if you are interested in becoming a candidate, please submit the
Candidacy Declaration form provided below to the
elections@nasa-academy.org, and this will be compiled with other
candidates and distributed to the list prior to balloting. Any other
questions or comments can also be sent to the elections e-mail.
Thank you, Robert Bayt(GSFC '93, GSFC Staff '94) and Jon Sims (GSFC '95)
Candidacy Declaration Form for NASA Academy Alumni Association Office
Email this form to elections@nasa-academy.org by October 25, 1998.
Check the office for which you are declaring candidacy:
____ President
Name: ________________________________________________________________
Please include a statement (100-500 words) of your qualifications for the
office, your goals for your term, and your vision for the future of NAAA.
On Saturday, September 26th, the weather and timing were right for many of
the NASA Academy alums round about Colorado to converge and converse. A
few diligent and outdoor-loving types met early to hike up to Royal Arch,
near Chautauqua Park in Boulder, with Mike Moreau leading and Don Olinger
and Erin Robinson trailing along.
Don and Erin, both Ames alumni, enjoyed the Ames domination for only a
short while as latecomers to the hike, Jeremy Richardson, Jeff Baltrush,
and Greg Richardson suddenly appeared on the trail. It was a steep hike,
hard on the lungs going up and hard on the knees going down. The payoff:
two impressively large boulders leaning up to create "the Royal Arch" and a
stirring panoramic view of Colorado's Front Range communities, all within
an hour of downtown Boulder.
Following this little adventure, the hikers and several other Academy
alumni converged on Mike's house for a barbecue. Other than the hot
weather (Colorado's high temperature Friday broke a 100 year old record) it
was a great day to get outside and hang out with some old and new friends.
Present were Don Olinger (ARC'97), Erin Robinson (ARC'98), Trey McDowell
(GSFC'93), Dave Kalman and Mike Moreau (GSFC'94), Jeremy Richardson
(GSFC'96), Jeff Baltrush, Jennifer Probst, and Jeff and Amy Tingley
(GSFC'97).
(Editor's note: the Colorado alumni try to have a large get-together at
least once a semester. I last heard that there are 16 alumni in Colorado,
and we have emails for all of them! Normally we just email the other
Colorado alumni regarding it, but if you are interested in try to attend,
please email me and I will ensure that we add your name to the list of
people we will inform regarding the next get-together. David)
The Electronic Phonebook on the NAAA website was just recently updated to
include all of the current contact information for the NASA Academy alumni
through September 26, 1998. The Electronic Phonebook provides a means for
all of you to have access to the most up to date contact information for
all of the alumni.
The "front end" allows you to query the Electronic Phonebook by searching
within several of the database fields, such as name, Academy center or
year, or current address to name a few. For example, you can search for a
particular person by entering their name, for all of the people in your
Academy "class" by entering 'GSFC 94', or all of the people in a
particular city or state. You are encouraged to look up your own entry
and let us know if any of your information is not displayed properly.
Simply visit the NAAA website (http://www.nasa-academy.org) and select
"electronic phonebook."
Of course, the information that is available is only as good as what you
have provided us with. For this reason, we encourage you to visit the
website and submit a membership form whenever you have any changes in your
contact information. When you submit a membership form, the information
is entered in the NAAA master database, and the email lists are updated to
reflect any changes you made on the form. Periodically, this master
database is uploaded to the Electronic Phonebook on the NAAA website, where
the alumni have access to it. Some of you may remember being assigned a
password so you could log on to the database and make changes yourself.
This feature is not being supported at this time, so the way to make
changes is to submit a membership form.
With the electronic phonebook now up and running the NAAA will be
introducing some new services to the alumni. The first is an email
aliasing service. You can now send email to anyone who has a current
"primary email address" listed in the database by sending a message to
Email messages sent to this address will automatically be directed to the
"primary email address" you have provided. So as long as you keep you
information up to date in the database, people will know how to reach you.
Everyone is assigned an 'alias' of the form 'firstname.lastname' for this
purpose. You can find out a person's alias by looking them up in the
e-phonebook.
As I have been involved with the formation of the NASA Academy Alumni
Association (NAAA), I have often wondered if what we were doing was worth
the effort. After helping the NAAA function on a monthly basis, it's only
now that I have a clear idea of exactly WHAT the NAAA should do. While
talking with over a dozen alumni during both my recent trip to Houston and
at the annual Goddard GSRP symposium, I am convinced more than ever that an
alumni association is crucial to the future success of the NASA Academy
programs.
Even though we call ourselves an "alumni association," I think the NAAA
must do more than support alumni related activities. Socializing is
important for members of different Academies to meet each other to create
the network of colleagues that is so important and an organized group like
the NAAA is the ONLY way that is going to happen. However, I have seen the
true potential benefit of the NAAA when it supports the NASA Academy
programs at each Center. There are four activities, I think the NAAA
should be involved with (in no particular order):
In addition to the annual alumni-related activities the NAAA has done thus
far, the other important roles filled by the NAAA include: facilitating
communication among the alumni (through the mailing lists, the monthly
newsletters, and the yearly magazine), tracking and keeping updated contact
information on the alumni, and making the resources and expertise of
individuals in the group available to all alumni.
At the NAAA Founders Meeting in February 1997, Dr. Soffen, the founder of
the NASA Academy program, suggested that we, as Goddard alumni, make
contact with the two new Academies at the Dryden Flight Research Center and
the Ames Research Center that were in the process of being formed to insure
the continued high quality of the program and that promoting the welfare of
the Academy should be high on our priority list. I agree that this is
exactly where the NAAA should focus its efforts in the coming years.
The ideas I discussed above are just that -- my ideas based on being
intimately involved with the NAAA over the last year and half and talking
with other alumni. I would love to hear what you think. Feel free to
e-mail (broberts@ssl.umd.edu) or give me a call (301.614.0690) if you would
like to share your views.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed here are strictly my own and do not
necessarily represent those of the NAAA or the NASA Academy.
After months of planning and lots of hard work (thanks to Jim Brice and
Ian Ruiz), the NASA Academy Alumni Association is proud to announce its
online gift shop. Part of the motivation for this is the fact that we (and
the Academy staff) get many requests about how people can get a bag, shirt,
etc. that the Academy RAs have during the summer.
We currently have lapel pins, polo shirts, and bags for sale, but the
possibility of what can be offered in the future (sweats, hats, cups,
license plate holders, golf balls, etc.) is endless.
The idea is not to use the sale of these items as a major fundraiser, but
rather to make a few dollars off of what we sell to recover our set-up
costs and to cover shipping them out to alumni. If you wish to make a
specific donation to cover some of the set-up charges, look for an e-mail
message to the list in the next week.
The lapel pins have the Academy logo with "NASA" above and "Academy" below
the logo. They sell for $5 to members of the NAAA, $7 to non-members, or
you can get one free with a $15 donation.
The polo shirts are 100% cotton and are the same shirts that the Academy
at Goddard purchased the last two summers with the Academy logo and the
words "NASA Academy" next to it on the front. You can select a variety of
colors for each "field" of the logo: 1) The "A" and 2) The swoosh around
the "A" and the text "NASA Academy". Medium, large, and extra large shirts
sell for $25 to members of the NAAA, $32 to non-members, and you get one
free with a $75 donation. Add $2 to the prices for XXL or XXXL shirts.
The bags are the same that last year's Goddard Academy purchased and have
the same logo found on the shirt. They sell for $50 to members of the
NAAA, $60 to non-members, and you get one free with a $150 donation.
We will be taking pin, shirt, and bag orders at the annual conference, but
if you are not attending the conference and wish to place an order, visit
the online gift shop at
Welcome back to everyone who has missed the newsletter over the summer. I
know that I missed reading on what everyone else has been up to over the
past few month.
I appreciate all of the articles that were submitted, and hope that this
flow of ideas continues. I especially enjoy see how all of the NASA
Academies are becoming active in the newsletter.
I hope that NAAA can get some new blood in for officers, to spread out the
workload and to get new ideas for the organization. Consequently, I
propose to publish all of the candidate statements in the next newsletter,
so that everyone can see what people think may be the direction for next
year's NAAA. I am sure that Mike M. will post something that details the
election schedule, and also when we need to re-register our members to be
eligible to vote.
Once again, welcome back to the NAAA newsletter, and send me what you are
doing. I am sure many people would be interested in hearing what is going
on.
David Kalman
Name: Jerry Gomez and Susan Wetstone
It's great to hear about so many familiar people doing such exciting
things! Susan and I (Jerry Gomez) are starting a completely different
course. We are going to be married in August, and a month later, I start
Dental School and Susan starts Medical School at the U. of Washington. We
bought a brand new house in Seattle and quit our jobs. Susan was working
for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a computer programmer
trying to solve the Phase Problem of X-Ray Crystallography (protein
structure determination), and I was working as an electrical engineer for
AVTECH, an avionics development and manufacturing company.
For fun, I read Russian literature and Susan reads Russian history.
We would both love to go to Russia itself someday (we're a little
fanatical: "Jerry, I swear I'm the last of the Romanovs!" Susan, 1997 ;)
) but we've done enough travelling the past four years (about 20
countries) that we've decided to go on strike against the airlines (one
more cancelled flight, and I'll go crazy (hee hee)). All in all, it has
been quite an adventure for both of us since the first day we met at the
NASA ACADEMY in 1994.
Sincerely,
For those Academy alumni who I have met, I wanted to share with you the
details on my new job. I recently (three weeks ago) left Boeing for a
position with Orbital Sciences Corp, in Dulles VA. I have taken a new
position as Systems Lead for a suite of experiments to be flown on the
X-34. The X-34 is a technology demonstrator vehicle to prove fast
turnaround operations for a hypersonic vehicle. It's stated purpose is
also to act as a test-bed for embedded and attached experiments. The
suite of experiments that I will oversee include thermal protection
systems and active vehicle health monitoring systems. For the Goddard
Academy students who visited Orbital each year, I'm sure you can
understand how excited I am to have this opportunity. So far, I can
tell you that Orbital lives up to its reputation. The engineering staff
here are smart, aggressive, and hard-working (not sure how I slipped in).
Right now I am commuting from my place in Greenbelt (1 hour and 10
minutes each way, on a good beltway day!). However, I made an offer
on a townhouse this weekend near Orbital; should the owner accept my
less than generous offer, I'll have a place for you all to stay when
you visit. Take care and please keep me posted on your whereabouts and
whatabouts. Jim
For future issues, I would suggest the following format for the
submissions:
Name:
So here they are, MSFC Academy 2 (1995), in their own words:
Jill Macklem
Well, probably unlike the majority of the members on the NAAA mailing
list, I'm not working directly in the space industry. I've been working
for The Boeing Company in the Commercial Airplane Group in Seattle for
about two and a half years now. Currently I work in Aerodynamics as a
stability and control engineer. The work is challenging, interesting, and
exciting, and I am enjoying it very much. I only hope I have enough
seniority and skill to survive the downsizing that, word is, we are about
to go through. :-P
Away from work, I'm enjoying participating in a wide variety of
sports-mainly indoor soccer and ice hockey. After breaking my wrist very
badly playing rugby two weeks before attending the Marshall Academy in '95
I decided to retire from that sport (much to my parents relief), but I just
can't give up sports altogether (much to my parent's chagrin). I'm also
still basking in the glow of the Detroit Redwing's TWO Stanley Cup
victories and the University of Michigan football national championship
season. WooHoo!! And like many 'Philes the world around, I'm counting
down the hours until November 8th when the X-Files season premieres.
(Yeah, go ahead and call me a geek for that-I've been called worse before.
;) )
That's about it from me. Ruth Moser
moser@kafb.aero.org (current work email..will be changing soon)
Home contact info:
Major Work Projects:
Discussion:
Other than work, I have been really busy trying to finish unpacking,
getting settled etc. If there are any other alumni in the Albuquerque area
(Sandia? Intel? etc) drop me a line.
Catherine Venturini
email: venturinic@cspar.uah.edu
Home contact info:
After MSFC Academy in '95, I took a few months off which included a trip
to Italy for two weeks to visit with family and see the sites. I came back
to good 'ol Huntsville, AL the beginning of 1996 to start graduate school
at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I am still there working on my
Master's degree in Physics. I am under an Alabama Space Grant Fellowship to
continue my research on Dusty Plasmas which I started under NASA Academy. I
hope to finish my degree no later then May 1999. When I finish I will
either look for a job or continue on for my Ph.D. I have not decided on
that yet!
Issue deadline: 26 Oct 5 PM MST
The following is the way to contact the officers of the NAAA:
THE NASA ACADEMY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
NAAA ELECTRONIC MAGAZINE
President's Message
David J. Goldstein
NAAA President
NAAA PresidentM
David@aeroastro.com
Election Information
Candidacy Declaration Form
____ Vice President of Operations
____ Vice President of Finance
Address: ________________________________________________________________
Phone: _______________________________
Email: _______________________________
Academy Attended (e.g., GSFC 1995): _________________________________
Out and About in Colorado
Erin Robinson (ARC'98)New and Improved Electronic Phonebook now on line
Julia Plummer (GSFC'97), Membership Chair
The NAAA: What's the Point?
Brian Roberts (GSFC '94, GSFC staff '95, NAAA VP Finance '97-'98)
NAAA Gift Shop Debuts
Editor's Ramblings
David Kalman, NAAA newsletter editor
djkalman@pcisys.net
NASA Academy Leads to True Love
email: Wetmez@aol.com
Home contact info: (206) 526-8485
Work company (or school): University of Washington
Work title: Dental & Medical students
Major work project(s):
Jerry Gomez, SAII
Special Where Are They Now - Jim Brice
Where are they now?
email:
Home contact info:
Work company (or school):
Work title:
Work contact info:
Major work project(s):
Discussion (2-3 paragraphs, can be either or both personal and work
related)
Jill Macklem
Work Title: MTS(Member of the Technical Staff)
Work Contact info: (see email above) 505-846-7891
(note: all work email and phone calls are monitored so don't send/say
anything you might regret).
I am doing a lot of system engineering work. The main program I am
supporting is UltraLITE (Ultra Lightweight Imaging Technologies
Experiments). The includes some structural work on the PDOS ground demo.
(Precision Deployable Optical Structures). And systems engineering and
management responsibilities as a part of the DST ground demo(Deployable
Space Telescope). UltraLITE is a part of the IGDL program at AFRL.
I just finished my masters at Utah State majoring in Mechanical
Engineering with an emphasis on Solid Mechanics. I then moved to
Albuquerque (literally one week after my defense) and started working for
The Aerospace Corporation in their regional office. I am on-site at the
AFRL at Kirtland Air Force Base.
Next Issue
Planned articles:
Contact Information