by D.W. G.
I was at the right place, at the right time. During my
Martin Marietta career, I was fortunate to achieve many firsts. While working
on the Matador missile program, I was the first (and only) engineer to perform
dynamic analysis on flight control systems in the field, including aerodynamic
transfer functions. The factory was not able to perform this function at the time
of manufacture.
Shortly thereafter, I was the first engineer to propose and
design semi-automatic test equipment for Mace missile and missile components. I
was also the Martin Marietta engineer to propose and lead the design of fully automated
hardwired launch checkout and launch sequencer for the Lacrosse missile. I was
also the first company engineer to engineer to propose and lead the system
design of practical, simplified launch test and sequencing equipment for operational
ICBM. Simplified equipment from approximately 35 racks to six racks of ground equipment.
The program was the Titan II.
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| Lacrosse Missile |
I was the first Martin engineer to use integrated
circuits, in any manner and first in the United States to use integrated
circuits for system logic design. I conceived and designed a general purpose control
processor (tape driven, since minicomputers not yet available), which could be
used to check out and control any missile or to control any process).
I started group courses on logic and computer
architecture design, wherein each student would select a topic and become the
instructor to the other students until the group understood the topic. Many of these
courses became company sponsored and are still taught today. This work started
us into the digital field. This was during the 1964 to 1967.
I also lead the design of a digital computer controlled
check-out and launch processing system, including detail design of the Input/output
equipment as well as the software (operating system and applications programs).
I was also the first Martin engineer to recognize the variation of software on
a project. On the Viking program we analyzed the linkages between software and
the lack of a project plan for requirement determination, documentation, development,
test and sell-off of that software. On Viking, I was assigned as a software
lead to define such a plan.
I am proud to have recognized the need for and to establish
a "make-play" committee to process all changes and to assure absolute
necessity of changes on the Ground Support Systems program. I also devised and
implemented the “team design” concept. The mechanical engineer, electrical
engineer, operations engineer, safety engineer, test requirements engineer,
logistics engineer and other disciplines were collocated with a team leader. Up
to 13 teams were formed to design over 100 fluid, electrical and mechanical
systems.
