The Short Version Of the question I get Most, How Did You Go From NASA To Porn?

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how did you go from NASA to porn? I will try to tell it, I don’t know if this post will ever see the “published” status, it may turn out too boring because it is all about me.

You kind of have to start at the begining.  I was always technically minded, my first job out of high school was working at a company that made high end color graphic work stations, my job was to test and troubleshoot them as they came off the assembly line.  The company was a Z 80 based color graphic work station it had 32K or RAM memory ran CP/M as an operating system was 512x512x4 bit planes (8 colors plus blink for any pixel) and sold for a tad under 100,000 dollars. Our primary customers were military and defense contractors  the year was 1978.  I had taken electronics in high school so the monitor and the analog electronics were my specialty.  I taught myself digital electronics as was soon troubleshooting and fixing every part of it.

It seemed to me that since it was a computer it should be able to troubleshoot itself at least to some degree so I set out to learn to program it.  I taught myself BASIC.  It was a fine language but useless for what I wanted to do, BASIC didn’t have the ability at the time to do things like direct memory addressing, so I bought a book on Z80 assembly language and taught myself to program in the microprocessors “native language”  That was what I needed and I soon had the memory testing itself  drawing a memory board on the screen and as each memory chip was tested it would turn it green or red, if it failed I knew which chip was failing.  I will tell you now that this is a bit of over simplification anyone who knows computers knows the Z80 was an 8 bit processor meaning that the maximum memory it could address was 32K and we were using 64K if you’d like a deeper explanation of how that was done email me.

When the owner of the company came by my work area one day and saw it he was fascinated, he asked me how I did it how I got around the memory addressing and the next day he called me into his office and made me a “Systems Analyst”.  I went from wearing T shirts to work to wearing a coat and tie, I also went from hourly to salary and suddenly I was in meetings with engineers who all had degrees from Georgia Tech I was no more than a high school graduate at the time. But I thrived.

When Motorola released a new 16 bit processor Chromatics designed a new 16 bit workstation based around it, it ran an operating system called UNIX.  I figured this would be a good thing to learn , but there were no books on UNIX just a set of technical journals from Bell Laboratories that explained how it worked, the manual was built into the OS in the form of what were called man pages, so if you wanted to know how to use a UNIX command you used a UNIX command called man to ask how to use it for example: “man dir” would tell you how to use the dir command.

The man pages didn’t explain how the operating system worked, the technical journals did.  I learned it and to make sure that I had learned it correctly I responded to a help wanted ad from the local community college looking for someone to teach an introductory course.  I got the job largely because I was willing to do it for the low hourly rate they offered and because not many people at the time knew it at all you couldnt even take an intro class at Georgia Tech

I taught nights along with my day job and my intuition was right, if you really want to understand a subject teach it to a room full of adults who want to learn it.  That is where I learned UNIX at a much better level.

I got a job offer from another company that made high end color graphic workstations around 1984 I think it was, The company was called Apollo and they were very big in defense contractor circles and the workstations ran UNIX in a networked environment, this was a big step up from Chromatics and I eagerly jumped on it after a year or so in Atlanta I was transferred to Huntsville Alabama my job was as a systems engineer and my customers were defense contractors at Redstone Arsenal and NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.  I worked from home keeping the networks and the systems running, troubleshooting problems and doing database design and implementation.  Relational Database were coming out and I was fascinated and learned Codds 12 rules and normal forms to 3NF.  Things ran like clockwork in Hunstville, all my customers had my direct number and were told to call me anytime day or night if they needed me and I would be there, they didn’t have to open a ticket and wait until it was assigned to me, we would do that the next day during normal business hours, the trade off was I had lots of days when I could go fishing or whatever so long as I had my pager with me (no cell phones yet).  My customers loved me and I loved them.

The STS-51-L happened and my life changed.  To those of you who aren’t NASA junkies STS-51-L was the Challenger mission.  I was at my apartment in Huntsville watching the launch on CNN, CNN was the only channel that carried it because the 3 major networks had decided that shuttle launches simply were so routine as to not be newsworthy. I remember how my heart sunk.  I had no idea that it would change my life.

NASA at Kennedy Space Center at that time was still running some of the computers from the days of the Apollo missions and they decided that the downtime after the Challenger disaster would be the ideal time to update and Apollo Computers had several customers there NASA, McDonald Douglas, Boeing, United Teledyne, Lockheed Space Operations to name a few and my boss at Apollo, King Butler came to me and asked me to take over the NASA Account.  It was called that because everyone out there worked for NASA, not necessarily directly but through defense contractors named above.

I had a great thing going in Huntsville and I didn’t want to leave it, but King pressed and I agreed to go out and meet the people and check it out.  I did and I turned it down.  King came back and took me to dinner and said that he really needed me there because of how well I dealt with the same companies in Huntsville, I always got great reviews and my customers loved me because they knew if they called me at 3 AM id be there within 30 minutess and I would stay and help till the job was done, these military guys respected my get it done, no bullshit attitude.  King told me that this was the pinnacle assignment that all eyes would be on me and how this went and that it would be a career maker for me, he said you will be working with the best of the best and that’s why I want you there, you are the best I have got.  I liked King so I agreed to give it a look again I spent the week plus a weekend in Cocoa Beach.  I got a real estate agent and found that for 100 dollars a month more than what I was paying for my apartment in Huntsville, I could get a 3 bedroom 2000 square foot condo right on the beach, direct ocean.  That went a long way on changing my mind.  That Saturday I went to Sebastian inlet and fished off the jetty and caught LOTS of fish.  I flew home thinking that wouldn’t be a bad life.

On Monday I called King and took the job, I made arrangements to move into my condo on the beach, I loaded up my corvette convertible and my girlfriend and I moved to Cocoa Beach Florida.

I approached the job same as I did the one in Huntsville, I got to know my customers, everyone there was still dealing with the Challenger accident so I just kind of stayed out of the way and learned the lay of the land.  I was given autonomy by King and I immediately hired an assistant to help me, guys name was Kevin Rhienowitz, we just called him Rhino.  His dad had worked at KSC for 25 years so he knew the politics, the history and his dad was still there to help I knew Kevin would be an asset, his job was to do the grunt work mostly, preventative maintenance, repair, stuff like that  mine would be to do network design, database design and general implementation, but primarily to assist as a technical liaison to anyone who  needed it that was a customer at Kennedy Space Center.

The two people I met and was immediately befriended by were Suzie Ruiz and John Poole, we all got along because like Kevin and I they were relatively young, and what I call hillbilly technocrats, in that they grew up in rural Florida and now had technical jobs and they were VERY good at what they did, as was everyone at KSC.  The one thing I learned quickly was that it was unlike any other place I had ever worked, everyone was better than good, they were the best and they had the fever, they bled the space program.

I had actually found my environment, I was given a job, how I did it was on me, I was left alone and I was not questioned like everyone else, we were all quirky and as different as people can be but in the end we were the best of the best and we were given way more latitude and autonomy, there was no micro managing.  As systems were replaced and things were updated and new ideas began to grow ambitious projects took root and to Kings credit nobody questioned my expenses or my methods the sole requirement was that it was done right and we did it right because everyone we worked with was as good as we were and collectively we respected each others abilities, we may not all get along some people hated each other but I cant think of anyone who didn’t respect everyone else there.

Much of the credit goes to John Suzie and Kevin who helped me to navigate the political minefield, by this time I had almost completed my political science degree but having people who knew the political landscape and that I loved and trusted have my back was invaluable. I was showered with awards and commendations and once again had done what I set out to do.  This was different though, my grandfather, in his 90s at the time had told me that he felt it was important what we were doing and that I owed this no less than my absolute best.  Thats what I gave.  If it was necessary, and sometimes it was I didn’t go home for days,  we would work until we got the job done sometimes it was helping and sometimes it was just being there as insurance.  Even though my house on the beach was only ten minutes to the gate at Cape Canaveral from there it was another 40 miles to Launch Complex 39 so if I wasnt on site I would be an hour to an hour and a half away so if a critical project on a tight deadline called for me to be there just in case they needed me, I was there.

Very little about the Space Shuttle is secret its built with public money so information is freely disseminated, BUT to work there a Top secret Security clearance was necessary.  In the scope of top secret clearances it was a very low level one, probably wouldn’t have gotten me into the mens room at Langley but sometimes the DOD had military payloads in the shuttle and everything about those launches was very secret,  specially things like launch times and anything about the payload.  There were 4 firing rooms   Rooms 1 and 2 were the NASA rooms, 3 and 4 were the DOD rooms, during a DOD launch cycle I was there throughout the cycle, I learned a lot about things like “range chicken” but to this day I cant explain it, it was a very very intense and stressful place, for example all 4 firing rooms had a plastic lined trash can at each station they were called vomit cans.  That pretty much explains the intensity of being in the firing rooms for a launch.

I thrived but the environment was intense and I was quickly burning out. It was crazy insane fun but it took a toll on you mentally and physically.  The turning point for me came when new management was hired at NASA and everything started becoming decision by committee, micro management had taken hold at NASA and there was no place for gunslingers like me, I left and decided to make a career change, during the transition to porn I made insane money as a consultant working 6 month contracts for fortune 50 companies at 1000 dollars a day plus expenses, that stint at NASA was solid gold on a resume.

Now you all know the story