Joel Gallun This is my home page. Everyone else has one, so I suppose I should too.

Update, April 21, 2020:  A follow-up to the previous update: TESS launched on April 18, 2018, because it was too windy on the 16th. It was glorious.

Our former project manager wrote the following on the second annaversiry of the TESS launch: "... So – as of a few days ago, the research observatory you all helped in creating – has a total of 45 confirmed exoplanet discoveries with 1,785 additional exoplanet candidates still under study. TESS is now on its 54th orbit between the Earth and Moon and it is evaluating its 23rd sector of the sky. I encourage you all to check out the latest TESS discoveries."

In addition to working on PACE, I am also working on the Wide Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, and looking forward to retiring.

I also need to fix the broken links again.

Update, March 14, 2018:  My current project is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS.   TESS is scheduled to launch from LC-40 at Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than April 16, 2018. I hope to be there when it launches.

My next, and I hope, final project will be the Plankton and Ocean Color Experiment, or PACE.

I also fixed all the broken links. You know you are getting old when the only information on the internet about most of your life is on Wikipedia.

Update, April 12, 2010: After the HST repair mission was cancelled (but before it was subsequently un-cancelled), I moved over to another project, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO . It was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral AFS while Washington DC was enduring the great blizzard of 2010, part deux , AKA the snowpocalypse . SDO is currently providing continuous 4K video of our Sun and helping us to understand more about it. 

After that I spent a couple of years working on the SGSS project , whose goal is to modernize NASA's Space Network .  

Duty called and I had to move onto something else, that being the Global Precipitation Measurement Project , or GPM. I was the Software System Engineer, which means I was responsible for all the software flying on the spacecraft.  GPM launched from Tanegashima, Japan in February of 2014 and has been contributing to our understanding of global climate and weather ever since.

Update, March 11, 2004: Well, I haven't updated this page in years, so its probably time to do so. I spent about 6 years doing Unix sysadmin and programming in various capacities at A very large On-Line service. I survived the dot-com meltdown, but just barely. In July of '03 I got a call offering me a position as a systems engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope Control Center System team. Then the space shuttle Columbia broke up over Texas and the HST repair mission was canceled. While I was waiting for the ax to fall I had a lot of time to think about various things: out-sourcing, off-shoring, SCO vs. IBM, the PATRIOT act, the DMCA and pervasiveness of digital technology in our daily lives. I don't have any answers, but I do have plenty of questions.

I'm on Facebook, but I don't post anything there anymore either. Look here for more out of date stuff.

When I'm not working, I like riding my bike, running, drinking micro-brews, driving my car on the track and spending time with my wife and our grandchildren. I'm also into local music. My favorite local band is Naked Blue.

My first experience programming computers was in physics class in high school (1976) where we had access to a Model 33 Teletype connected to a timesharing computer with a 110 baud acoustic coupler. It was crude and slow but I was hooked. After that I took a degree in comp sci at the University of Maryland , learning FORTRAN, COBOL and assembler by punching cards and dropping them off to be run in batch mode. Even compared to the Model 33 it was a drag.

In 1979 I got a job to write business applications in FORTRAN on a PDP-11 for a commercial bakery. Not only did I have access to an interactive computer system with 9600 baud video terminals, I got all the free cookies I wanted, too. The only drawback was that there was no one to learn from. Reading the DECUS newsletters made me think that there must be intelligent life out there somewhere, so about 1981 I set out in search of it. I spent a year at a Major Non-commercial Television Network helping to build a prehistoric network that used a satellite link for the downstream data along with telephone modems for the return data.

In 1982 I landed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center , where I had the chance to work on lots of neat projects and develop software for all sorts of now-obsolete systems, one of which earned the Nobel Prize for the Principal Investigators. I also had a lot of opportunities to travel, including 4 trips to the including 4 trips to the South Pole , where I installed the first e-mail link from there to the outside world.

In 1987 I left NASA and went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation , or DEC as it was known in those days. I did a number of projects for different customers, including a Tough Guy That Sold TenderChickens . I had wanted to do operating system programming for a long time and I finally got a chance to do that by being a contributor to the VMS version 5 effort.

In 1989 things started to go downhill for DEC, and I left to work in the robotics lab at NASA. It was the most fun I ever had at work. The only problem was when we made mistakes things broke. Sometimes big things. I learned a lot about attention to detail while I was programming there. We also flew a VAX on the space shuttle , which was really exciting. It was also where I had my first exposure to Unix and TCP/IP and I became a convert.

In 1992 or so, the Space Station Freedom (which had been funding the robo lab) had shrunk to the point the robots we were developing weren't required anymore, and Congress (opposite of progress?) killed the robo lab. I went to work as the IT manager for the company that I had been working for.

I stayed around there until early 95 when I joined the Internet Engineering department at MCI, where I was the sysadmin for all of the Unix hosts used to support the operation of the backbone. I had the chance to learn a lot about network engineering from real experts in their fields, including our vice president, who was one of the co-inventors of TCP/IP.

I stayed at MCI until August of 96 when I joined some friends that had started a company that was trying to sell cable modems for Internet access. I mostly did business development while I was there but I stayed involved with Unix so my hair didn't get completely pointy . We burned through our venture funding (at that point in time cable companies still thought the internet was just a fad) and ran out of money in the fall of 1997 and I worked as an independent Internet consultant for several years.

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