Meet the Team: Steve Beland

Written by Tom Nugent on Friday, August 31st, 2007

Next in our “Meet the Team” series of posts is Steve Beland.

During the day, Steve works on airplanes. In his precious free time (not very much these days, because of a certain deadline he has at work), he helps LaserMotive with systems engineering and control electronics.

Steve is yet another one of those people I happened to meet via LiftPort. While working on a graduate degree in Systems Engineering (doing coursework online while working his day job and raising a family), he wrote a few papers on complex system engineering topics and sometimes used a Space Elevator as an example to illustrate points made in the ideas promoted in the papers. In the pursuit of this graduate work that used the space elevator to illustrate his points, Steve contacted Liftport to share his work and seek input on his research. We spoke a number of times about the space elevator and his work, and once I got going with LaserMotive, I knew he’d be a great person to have involved.

Before coming to Washington state, Steve got his degree in Michigan Tech. It was a job offer from that Really Large Airplane Company that drew him to Washington State. He thought he’d try it for a couple years, and now more than twenty years and many models of airplane later (along with that graduate degree), he is on a team developing safety-critical control systems and coordinating their certification with the FAA. He enjoys the space elevator competition, as it is a chance to get away from some of the bureaucracy and to participate in a development cycle that’s much shorter than the products he normally works. I suspect he’s probably looking forward to November, when both of his major commitments are scheduled to be over their humps.