Meet the Team: Jordin Kare
Written by Tom Nugent on Monday, September 10th, 2007
Next in the “Meet the Team” series is arguably the most critical person on our team: chief engineer and team co-founder Jordin Kare. The Robert A. Heinlein Centennial schedule book had a great bio of him:
Jordin Kare really is a Rocket Scientist. He has degrees in physics and electrical engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D in Astrophysics from U.C. Berkeley. As a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, he led a national R&D program on ground-to-orbit laser launch, helped plan the Clementine lunar mapping mission, and designed the Mockingbird miniature launch vehicle. He left LLNL in 1996 to become a freelance satellite designer, consulting for aerospace companies and government agencies. He has received two NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts fellowships, holds four patents, and has invented two different interstellar propulsion systems. As of 2007, Dr. Kare is a full-time staff inventor and program manager for Intellectual Ventures and also chief engineer for LaserMotive…. He lives in Seattle … in what is probably the only 100-year-old house in the world with a Class IV Laser warning sign on the utility room door.
I met Jordin while I was at LiftPort, and approached him about doing more work involving laser power beaming. We decided that the Elevator:2010 Beam Power contest would be the best way to demonstrate to the world the great advances made in solid state lasers. He designed our overall system as we were recruiting people to join the team.
The breadth and depth of Jordin’s knowledge and background continually impresses me. No matter what facet of our system is under discussion for design, fabrication, etc., he’ll usually be familiar with best practices in that area. All of our team members are important, but without Jordin, LaserMotive would not exist and could not have progressed to where we are today.
As I said above, Jordin wanted to compete in the Beam Power competition because it could be a stepping stone to a wide variety of potential applications for laser power beaming. Immediately after this year’s event is over, though, he will probably luxuriate in not getting ten billion emails per day from me.