Doug Rickard (26 May 1939 – 7 May 2002) was an

Australian Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal A ...

-born space engineer. He is known for his stories of engineering while at the Woomera Deep Space Station. He died in 2002 from

myelofibrosis Primary myelofibrosis (PMF) is a rare bone marrow blood cancer. It is classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a type of myeloproliferative neoplasm, a group of cancers in which there is growth of abnormal cells in the bone marrow. ...

caused by contact with

cobalt-60 Cobalt-60 (60Co) is a synthetic radioactive isotope of cobalt with a half-life of 5.2713 years. It is produced artificially in nuclear reactors. Deliberate industrial production depends on neutron activation of bulk samples of the monoisot ...

while working at the

Maralinga Maralinga, in the remote western areas of South Australia, was the site, measuring about in area, of British nuclear tests in the mid-1950s. In January 1985 native title was granted to the Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara Aborig ...

nuclear test facility. Some of his stories have been collected by the

Australian Broadcasting Corporation The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is the national broadcaster of Australia. It is principally funded by direct grants from the Australian Government and is administered by a government-appointed board. The ABC is a publicly-own ...

, whose logo he possibly inspired (although the logo was designed by Bill Kennard), under the title ''Memoirs of a space engineer''. Additional humorous engineering stories include hand-decoding images from

Mariner 4 Mariner 4 (together with Mariner 3 known as Mariner-Mars 1964) was the fourth in a series of spacecraft intended for planetary exploration in a flyby mode. It was designed to conduct closeup scientific observations of Mars and to transmit the ...

onto a sheet of graph paper since

NASA JPL The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in the 1930s by Caltech researchers, JPL is owned by NASA a ...

had only built a single display system, running a magnetic tape recorder 25 times over its rated speed to have enough bandwidth to record

Ranger 9 Ranger 9 was a Lunar probe, launched in 1965 by NASA. It was designed to achieve a lunar impact trajectory and to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface during the final minutes of flight up to impact. The spacecraft carried s ...

video of its impact on the moon, and an impromptu excavation of Pompeii's plumbing systems. Rickard also worked for some time for the Australian subsidiary of Digital Equipment Corporation. During that time he was seconded to Project Athena, the Campuswide Computing environment developed at MIT, with the specific responsibility of developing "Bones" a version of the Kerberos Authentication System, that did not relying on strong encryption, and as such would not require US Government approval for export.

References

1939 births 2002 deaths Australian engineers 20th-century American engineers {{US-engineer-stub