User:RockinRob

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I'm Rob, and I'm an engineer. I grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, where I worked at Al's Hobby Shop in the Roosevelt Mall. After graduating Northeast High School in 1984, I went to Penn State Ogontz, and then moved to Penn State's main campus in 1986. I received my degree in Aerospace Engineering in 1990. After working at convenience stores, the IRS, and a department store, I landed my first job on SOHO in 1996, and moved to suburban DC in order to work at NASA Goddard.

I left SOHO after 3 years, and then I worked on NEAR at JHU/APL. After NEAR was landed on Eros, I returned to Goddard to work on Terra. After Terra, I worked on Aqua, doing GNC work before launch, and I became the Flight Software Engineer a year after launch, and also helped to support Aura pre-launch. I left Aqua and Aura in 2004 to jump at the chance to work on Swift, because it meant moving back to bucolic Happy Valley, otherwise known as State College, PA. I consider myself really fortunate to have the opportunity to live and work where I went to school.

What I might like to write about
I'd be interested in writing a wikibook about spacecraft design and operations. The emphasis would be on actual spacecraft engineering versus spacecraft of scientific fiction. I believe a large amount of spacecraft-related information already exists on Wikipedia and Wikibooks, and I'd like to begin to pull it together, but I think the subject is too large for a Wikipedia article or series of articles.