things. Like ocean based farms to grow giant sea kelp
for advanced energy production or sometimes some
NASA projects.
He came home one day with a pack full of Apollo
astronaut food that he wanted my sisters and I to
see. He’d been working on better ways to package
it. Then one time I remember he brought home some
experimental methods of attaching Space Shuttle tiles.
This was while the Space Shuttle was being designed,
before it ever flew the first time. They were trying to avoid
using glues, but the final design ended up going with
an adhesive. There were a number of really interesting
projects like that. He had a patent on an extendable
boom to rescue astronauts in the event their tethers
broke. Just a really interesting mix of things.
When I went to college I studied physics at a small
liberal arts school in western Pennsylvania. I became
interested in satellite communication because of some
of the interests that my professor had. He was a ham
radio operator and he wanted to design an antenna
that could track the OSCAR satellites as they went
overhead. So that was one of my projects when I was
in college. I came up with a system that would use
common television antenna gear to track a satellite.
At the same time, the microchip had just become
practical. I wouldn’t say powerful, but useful. This was
1977 or so and I had played with them making the
satellite communication controllers plus a few other
things. My idea for a career was that these chips
were going to be very popular and
since National Cash Register, NCR,
was just down the road I wanted
My father
to work there designing cash
registers. That was my goal.
would work
My mistake was that NCR
was hiring electronics
on these really
engineers, not physicists.
crazy things.
I ended up going
with my second choice,
Like ocean based which was aerospace.
I was offered a job
farms to grow
at General Electric
giant sea kelp
working
out
of
Philadelphia and Valley
for advanced
Forge, Pennsylvania. I
spent 10 years working for
energy
GE in Pennsylvania, until one
production.
day I was working on what
was then called ‘Space Station
Freedom’ and NASA made me an
offer I couldn’t refuse. Within a couple
of weeks I was working at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center on the space station in Maryland.”
RS: Since going to work for NASA, you’ve been involved
in the development of more than two dozen satellites
and other spacecraft?
ADAMS: “I remember when NASA put that factoid
together the count was 26. It’s probably gone up now,
40
40
but that’s right. Many, many communication satellites.
Some pieces of the Space Shuttle, the kitchen and
the waste collection system. I’ve got some really funny
stories about the Space Shuttle toilet. Let’s see. Some
military systems. Some international collaborations. I
worked on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite,
if you remember that. It was up there for years and
years. Various versions of Landsat, the Wind and Polar
satellites, those were space physics missions looking at
the sun, as well as GOES weather satellites. The Earth
observing system Aura spacecraft was also one of
mine. STEREO, the pair of spacecraft we launched to
image the Sun’s coronal mass ejections in 3D, I worked
on that. I don’t know that I can list them all. And then
I got into planetary science, where I was privileged to
be a part of Dawn, MESSENGER, Phoenix, Juno, GRAIL,
MSL and LADEE.”
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