Next in our “Meet the Team” series of posts is David Shoemaker.

I’ve known David Shoemaker for a few years, because we were both involved in LiftPort, where he worked building space elevator climber concept prototypes. He did principal design, construction and programming for nearly 20 different models over 3 years, in addition to his day job at Microsoft. David agreed to join the LaserMotive team last fall, and as I mentioned before, he helped bring Carsten Erickson onto the team. David has been developing our vehicle control system and telemetry, and is working with Steve Beland on another part of our control system.

David was interested in computers from a very young age, and wound up teaching himself more than available school courses could offer. He sold his first piece of software as a junior in high school, to a local comic book shop. He opened his own computer/software store at age 20, and then parlayed that experience into a job as a programmer contracted to the Navy.

Back in 1994, David got into coin-op arcade game collecting, and he opened a service business doing repairs (down to the board level), restorations, and sales on the side. For better or worse, other projects have sidelined much of the coin-op work.

Following the Navy, David has worked at Microsoft in various departments. For the last six years, he’s been with the WinCE group doing embedded software development.

Once the competition is over, I imagine David will be happy to have a bit of free time to get back to working on his house. Until then, though, he’s rocking out on controls!

Next in our “Meet the Team” series of posts is Carsten Erickson.

Carsten is the owner of Coolearth Software, which provides Supply Chain Execution and warehouse management software to food and beverage manufactures across North America. Carsten co-founded the company 10 years ago and has been growing it one customer at a time since then. When he’s not flying across the country on business, Carsten and the rest of the Coolearth team are developing for LaserMotive a computer vision system that tracks our vehicle as it moves up the ribbon, as well as some other automated elements of our system.

We found Carsten thanks to David Shoemaker (who we’ll introduce in a later post) attending a Seattle Robotics Society meeting. David was presenting about the space elevator concept in general, and at the end of his talk he issued a call for people that might be interested in starting a team to compete in the NASA / Spaceward contest. Carsten and his family have been involved in racing of one type or another, Go-Kart, Hydro, Vintage Sports Car, for his entire life and thought it would be a fun and an important event to participate in. Little did Carsten know what he’d get into upon attending his very first SRS meeting!

Carsten says he sees the competition as a chance to push available technology a bit further, and potentially provide new power beaming applications both here on earth and in space. But like all of us, I think he’s also motivated by just cool the whole competition is!

I’d like to introduce the various team members at LaserMotive, so I’ll be doing a regular set of blog posts to briefly talk about people on the team. I’m going to start with the first person to join the team: Steve Burrows.

Steve is the co-owner of Twintec. He and his brother make a variety of specialty tubing connectors, used in things such as hydraulic systems. Any time we need something machined, we go bug Steve. Almost as critical is the fact that Twintec is letting us share their workshop, giving us room to work and test.

I met Steve via the LiftPort forums a few years ago, and knew of his interest in the space elevator and the fact that he co-owned a well-equipped machine shop. When Jordin and I first decided to form a team to pursue the Elevator:2010 Power Beaming competition, we contacted Steve to see if he would be interested. We’re grateful that he was interested, because Steve and his brother Chris have contributed so much to the team.

In addition to his machining experience, Steve used to work with printing presses. That kind of experience is directly applicable to climbing ribbons. Steve (and Chris) have helped design and fabricate not only the vehicle, but also many other mechanical structures for our optics, testing structure, etc.

That’s probably enough of an introduction for now. If you want to know different kinds of information about team members, let me know and I’ll try to craft future “Meet the Team” posts appropriately.