Kevin L Parkin is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 scientist active in beamed energy propulsion.

Areas of Interest

Rocket propulsion and gasdynamics, high power microwaves and directed energy, object-oriented software engineering

Software engineering

Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...

, space mission design

Overview

Dr. Parkin is currently a member of the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Research Staff and previously Deputy Director of the Mission Design Center at NASA Ames, and project lead for the Microwave Thermal Rocket. Beginning with his Ph.D. thesis on Microwave Thermal Propulsion, his work spans theoretical, computational and experimental domains for the general problem of space access and economics. In July 2005, he was awarded the Korolev Medal by the Russian Federation of Cosmonautics.

He founded the NASA Ames Mission Design Center (MDC) and developed its software architecture. The Ames MDC was the first of its kind to make extensive use of groupware, for example in pooling knowledge to create and maintain spacecraft parts databases. Another innovation was the use of a centralized parametric mission design archive that enables realtime concurrent design collaboration and object-oriented style 'inheritance' of missions to promote reuse of designs and the growth of design trees.

Dr. Parkin is a member of the Institute of Physics

Institute of Physics

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of around 40,000....

 (IOP) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics is the professional society for the field of aerospace engineering. The AIAA was founded in 1963 from the merger of two earlier societies: the American Rocket Society , founded in 1930 as the American Interplanetary Society , and the Institute...

(AIAA).

Patents and Selected Publications

Parkin, K.L.G, and Culick, F.E.C, The Microwave Thermal Rocket, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, in preparation.

Parkin, K.L.G, The Microwave Thermal Thruster and its Application to The Launch Problem. Ph.D thesis, June 2006.

Kevin L.G. Parkin, Joel C. Sercel, Michael Liu, Daniel P.

Thunnissen, ICEMakerT: An Excel-Based Environment for Collaborative Design, IEEE Aerospace Conference, March 8–15, 2003, Big Sky, MT.
IEEEAC Paper #1564.

K.L.G Parkin. A Microwave Heat-Exchange Thruster and Method of Operation the Same. - U.S. Patent 6993898

External links

• http://www.cmu.edu/silicon-valley/faculty-staff/parkin-kevin.html
• http://cbc.ca/quirks/media/2010-2011/qq-2011-03-05_04.mp3
• http://sixwoffers.blogspot.com/2011/05/beam-them-up-launching-spacecraft-on.html