Page 186 - MY STORY

and I worked together to convince management to invest

more capital funds to design and build a programmable
15 KW laser to meld with our vacuum chamber along
with other measuring equipment to determine spectral

properties of materials in vacuum before and after
exposure to damaging laser radiation. We won the
SMATH program easily beating serious competition from

all over the USA.

This was the beginning of an eight-year activity for me.

Dave F and I became close personal friends and
co-managed this program and many, many follow-on

programs for the AFRL. Dave left the team after a couple
of years and by then the AFRL folk considered me a “true
systems person.” All-in-all my small team probably
captured more than $15,000 000 in contracted Research

and Development (CRAD) through 1984.

We rarely, if ever, lost a competitive bid for a contracted
program in this technical area. During that sojourn, I
became familiar with infra-red materials of all sorts,

measurement methods, satellite subsystems, thin film
dielectric coatings, and management of heavily
subcontracted multimillion-dollar programs.