My name is Bruce LeRoy I'm a TDRS telecommunication systems engineer. Well,
I got involved in, with TDRS, per se, a long time before I came here. Back in
1988. I worked up at General Electric. Valley Forge, and I was responsible for
bidding the technical proposals for STGT, which is the second TDRS ground
terminal, which didn't exist at that time. Challenges come in, in, two or
three flavors some of them are people challenges, okay, and I had a particularly
onerous one on TDRS-K. I'm responsible for selling off all the requirements
which means that we spent probably 18 months getting all of the requirements
and coming to agreements with the contractor on what artifacts we were
going to use to sell off which requirement and at what level. We had an
end-to-end from sensor to actuator requirement which is very difficult to
test in 1g especially for the ACS people so the attitude control folks they did
an end-to-end but it was such a pain to do that we agreed that later spacecraft
we would do it in pieces rather than the whole end-to-end thing simultaneously.
The team provides me with fun and if you can't go to work in the morning and have
fun all day and get paid for it then you might as well quit.
TDRS-M is doing great and we're going to launch it very shortly and it's going
to be great and it will be ducky.
Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep